Vince Reinhart
Artwork by Kimothy Joy.
The summer before one of my first teaching jobs, I joined other new staff for a month’s worth of lectures and workshops, learning skills and information administrators deemed fundamental to classroom success. We covered topics ranging from phonics to number sense, data analysis to communication with parents; we read articles on education policy, learning disabilities, and child development. We created grading rubrics and wrote months’ worth of lesson plans: every learning target would be addressed, every minute accounted for. When the year began, they assured us, we’d be ready.
And yet, after meeting my second graders, I realized that one of the biggest challenges I would face that year had not been covered, or even imagined, by the creators of those summer sessions: I had a student who could not stop farting. He farted in line, at his desk, sitting on the rug; the poor kid just could not hold it in.
Before becoming a teacher, I studied education at some of the country’s most esteemed institutions; I was mentored by world-renowned professors of education, scholars who had schools and schools of thought devoted to their theories. I admired my professors’ acumen, their willingness to interrogate the status quo, to consider children and education in new and novel ways. After I began teaching, though, I realized that many of my mentors’ theories—crafted, as they were, in the refined light of the ivory tower—did not hold up under the harsh fluorescence of a real-life classroom. My colleagues and I talked about this often: we wondered when these powerful, far-off figures—the academics, theorists, and politicians who determined what, when, and how we taught—had last interacted with children they weren’t related to, let alone spent a day in a school. We discussed the vast discrepancies between the children in our care—precocious children, traumatized children, children who were exceptional and quirky—and the subjects of scholarly studies and government policies. We came to call these subjects theoretical children.
Theoretical children are useful: they are predictable, generalizable, they lend themselves easily to political agenda. But theoretical children don’t exist.
Theoretical children are useful: they are predictable, generalizable. They lend themselves easily to an agenda; nothing they do is inexplicable. Their development is linear, their roadblocks routine. They exist neatly in quantified data; they are easily essentialized. Theoretical children don’t cry for no reason, they don’t laugh out of turn; theoretical children certainly don’t fart.
Theoretical children are discussed often by scholars and policymakers, but theoretical children don’t populate our classrooms— because theoretical children don’t exist.
There’s an old joke economists like to tell: a dairy farmer is struggling with low milk production, and gathers a team of experts to propose a solution. Everyone is stumped—except the economist, who begins by declaring, “Assume a spherical cow in a vacuum . . .”
Those who set the course of education policy are at an increasing remove from real children, the children whose lives are determined by their decisions. Every public school teacher in New York City is forced to use a writing curriculum based on made-up dialogue between made-up children. The majority of Secretaries of Education have never taught in a K-12 classroom; the current holder of the position is only the most egregiously clueless. The head of the College Board has never taught; the same goes for the heads of Teach for America and the nation’s most influential education philanthropies.
Teachers—the players who best understand the realities of schools today—are routinely excluded from education policy decisions, both at the local and national level. Students old enough to participate in discussions about their own schooling and educational experiences are ignored and condescended to. That is, theoretical children feature prominently, while actual children—those most affected by policies—almost never do.
That is, until students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School inserted themselves into the national conversation and refused to be silenced. As I watched Marco Rubio sweat and deflect the fierce questioning of seventeen-year-old Cameron Kasky on CNN, I realized that I was witnessing something extraordinary. Rubio was dealing with real children, children who were angry, who refused to be ignored, who refused to be relegated to the realm of the theoretical. (It is worth noting that this is not the first time youth have fiercely advocated for themselves, historically or in our current moment; the young activists of the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, come immediately to mind.)
These students are telling us, loud and clear, that the lives lost to gun violence never existed only in theory: the murdered children were very real, and so is the survivors’ grief. These students— real, articulate, powerful students— are telling us to put aside our theories, and to listen. Now we must follow their lead.
Emily Kaplan is a writer and public school teacher living in New York. Her website is emilykaplan.net. Follow her on twitter at @emdashkap.