It’s easy to mock George Packer for what he writes in this Atlantic essay about choosing a school for his son in New York City.
But I find his essay heartbreaking as well as complex. He’s a well-meaning liberal who checks all the usual liberal boxes, who wants social justice and diversity and is against what he continually refers to as “meritocracy” (as though that’s a bad thing), but is reluctant to make his child pay the price, and is torn about knowing what’s best for his child’s education. We all want the best for our children—at least, we should—and George Packer does. He hasn’t much of a clue what it might be or how to go about obtaining it, and his confusion is understandable in this day and age of the progressive hard left takeover of NYC public schools.
Packer states that he and his wife went to public schools. But he was born in 1960, so he attended in the 60s and 70s. I went to NYC public schools, from kindergarten right through to high school graduation, about ten years prior to Packer. So although we’re of slightly different generations, and no doubt there were some differences in our experience in public schools (his was in San Francisco, and from his description of it in the essay it was significantly better then mine), our experience spent in public schools probably had far more similarities than either of us would have with the experience of a student who attends public schools today in the same places.
The demogaphics in New York City schools were different in my time, for starters. My school was diverse by the standards of the day: students from the projects, low income students of all races, and kids from various ethnic backgrounds, but probably nothing resembling the proportions today. There was a stratified track system and the honors students had all their classes together. Teachers were mostly old and the curriculum was traditional, and pretty challenging for the honors students. There was some violence and some trouble and some family strife, but absolutely nothing on the order of what you find in most city schools now. The atmosphere was far from ideal, and it wasn’t as good as the private school some friends went to, but it wasn’t bad at all. Every year, a number of graduates from my public high school went to elite universities, and others went to not-bad universities, although the majority of students from my high school never went on to college at all or went to a 2-year community college.
I think it was pretty typical of the times, but very different from now. So what Packer was facing when he contemplated a public school system for his son (he was too financially strapped to continue paying the exorbitant fees of the private schools of New York) is something far different than what my parents or his own parents faced.
Here’s Packer, describing his decision to send his son to a specially selected public school that wasn’t his local school but was reputed to be pretty good:
[The school’s] combination of diversity, achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-of in New York public schools. This school squared the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. We got wait-listed.
The summer before our son was to enter kindergarten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter making the case that our family and the school were a perfect match called with the news that our son had gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a half of them.
I can see now that a strain of selfishness and vanity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cosseted New York of successful professionals. I had no authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s very different groups that our son was about to enter. I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school bus to an institution whose name began with P.S.
Things are okay at the school for a quite a few years. But at some point—Packer pinpoints it as around 2014—the situation begins to change. Although he’s in sympathy with liberal politics, the atmosphere now transitions to, in his words, “the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology” which he also refers to as a “new progressivism.”
I would describe it as a switch from liberal to left.
It initially took the form of voluntary opting out of standardized testing because it was supposedly racist, and here’s how Packer describes the process:
Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.
Ya think, George? Surprise, surprise.
Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s parents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of her grandmother, who had been the heart of the family, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.
It’s odd that a man as smart as Packer wouldn’t have understood in the first place that this would happen as a result of “dismissing meritocracy.” But not really, because liberalism can block logic and thoughts that are not politically acceptable. It is to Packer’s credit that he came to admit the problem at all, and that he wrote about it.
Packer describes the decision he and his wife made to have their son take the tests. This may seem neither revolutionary nor brave, but believe me it did take some courage in the face of fairly intense pressure to conform. He writes:
[A school administrator Packer spoke to on the phone] described all the harm that could come to our son if he took the tests—the immense stress, the potential for demoralization. I replied with our reason for going ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.
Our son was among the 15 or so students who took the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan.
Or in the USSR, back in the olden days.
You know where this led, don’t you? Exactly where you think it might:
The school’s progressive pedagogy had [previously] fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.”
Next came gender-neutral bathrooms:
The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day.
Sad, but unsurprising. But the kids came up with a solution—they simply divided into sexes and used the old bathrooms, same way as before the gender-neutral relabeling.
Packer’s article then veers off into a lengthy riff on the awfulness of Donald Trump and how Packer’s kids were traumatized by Trump’s election and beset by a host of fears (for example, his daughter was worried that Trump would split up their family). Packer reacted by damping down the political talk in front of his children (not a bad idea, actually) rather than changing any of his liberal viewpoints.
Unsurprising, really, because a mind is a difficult thing to change.
Packer goes on to describe how the curriculum his children learned in school both frightened them and made them feel guilty. Again, I don’t see Packer questioning the truth or falsehood of the actual content they learned—that would probably be too threatening for him—but he certainly is aware of its terrible impact on his children:
[Packer’s son had] been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked. Our daughter wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—she came home from school one day and expressed a wish not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience. It did not seem like a moral victory for our children to grow up hating their species and themselves.
And then Packer states this—which does not echo the liberal party line:
Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.
I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics.
Civics, yes! And then Packer veers back again into liberal paranoia about Trump – without, as is typical, explaining what Trump is doing that illustrates Packer’s judgments about him. Packer may think that everyone reading the Atlantic agrees with him about the utter obviousness of Trump’s awfulness:
By age 10 [Packer’s son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed.
I find this fascinating, this oscillation between a rejection of the excesses of liberalism and leftism and a wallowing in them.
Packer’s piece ends with a description of the de Blasio/Carranza school system in NYC (I wrote this post on Carranza), in which the idea of race and privilege hierarchies is practically the only idea there is. At some point his son asks the following poignant question: “Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading…not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” Well yes, it used to be, but not any more.
Packer is sad and he’s bewildered. He doesn’t really know how this all came up, doesn’t connect the dots, and he doesn’t know what to do. The idea that the right has some answers never really occurs to him. I sympathize with him in his struggle, and wonder where it may ultimately lead. At the moment, the cognitive dissonance is fierce.
I didn’t really write this post to muse on the dilemma of George Packer the individual. But he’s especially interesting to me because I believe he stands for a large group of liberals who are currently wrestling with the consequences of what they supported, thinking the results would be good, and finding that the left had other and more terrible things in mind.
