When Society Expects Us to Fail, We Usually Do

Season 4 of The Wire focused on a group of 8th graders caught between school and the reality of urban life

Lurking underneath data about nonprofit performance and hiding in the shadows behind our enthusiasm about innovative approaches to social change is a reality that saps our ability to create change.

When society expects us to fail, we usually do.

In a profoundly important piece published in the Washington Post today, former teacher Sarah Fine writes about why she left teaching behind after four years of incredible effort. She lists the culprits you expect, of course. "Burnout," she says, is shorthand for the frustration of dealing with apathetic students, administrations that add work and limit authority without changing pay, and all the other things we've come to associate with a broken education system.

But that wasn't, in the end, what drove her out. She admits with difficulty that it was as much about the way the rest of the world saw her as it was about anything she felt day to day:

Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it's unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it's not for the ambitious. "It's just so nice," was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.

She goes on to reinforce the notion that her Millennial generation is engaged and active, but sagely notices that the flip side of engagement can be a challenge, as well: "Our engagement also explains why we are leaving the classroom. We are not used to feeling consistently defeated and systemically undervalued."

How ironic.

How ironic that this young woman who had given four years to trying to make it in this vital position eventually had to succumb to the exact same sort of expectations of failure that likely made it so difficult for her students to succeed.

We expect failure from students who grow up around drugs and without strong parental and community support. We expect failure from the teachers who would try to give them a different path forward.

In so doing, we cue society to look at our education system, and by extension the people in it, as broken; worthy of pity and perhaps even sad admiration, but fundamentally fighting an unwinnable battle and as such, naive.

And while our media machine holds up the Finding Forrester examples of unexpected success, the focus on exceptional individuals in the stories we tell ends up reinforcing the hopelessness of the system as a whole.

While we understand, on some intuitive level, the debilitating impact of societal scorn, it remains far too easy for us to write away the emotional impact of societal pity. This is what Sarah Fine is talking about when she asks why her lawyer friends never have to explain why they do what they do. It's not about the work itself, but about the way society values that work.

In many ways, this all comes back to success and is at the center of Alain de Botton's recent talk at TEDGlobal on a kinder, gentler form of success. He linked career anxiety and modern society's justmental tendency to define a person in terms of what they do with the particular way we value material items. In his estimation, we are not a particularly materialistic society, we've simply come to associate certain types of emotional rewards of success with the position of particular types of goods. The point is that it's the emotional reward we're after, not the good itself.

I can't help but be reminded of a moment from South Park, which I continue to believe is the most dead-on pop cultural commentary we have. In this particular episode, 8-year old Kyle Broslovski is asking his father for money for a Chimpokomon, the newest toy that all the students at school must have:

Kyle: Dad, can I have money for a chimpokomon?..Please everyone else has one
Father: Well, Kyle, that's not a reason to buy one. You see son, fads come and go. And this chimpokomon is nothing more than a fad. You don't have to be a part of it. In fact, you can make an even stronger statement, by saying to your peers, I'm not going to be a part of this fad, because I'm an individual. Do you understand son?
Kyle: Yes, yes I do dad. Now let me tell you how it works in the real world. In the real world, I can either get a chimpokomon, or be the only kid without one, which singles me out, and makes the other kids make fun of me and kick my ass.
Father: Hmm. Good point. Here's $10. Actually, here's $20, get one for your brother as well.

The way that a society makes judgments about the value of any good or any pursuit has an immense impact on the way people pursue those things. The expectations that a society has for people in any particular position, whether it's as a teacher in an inner city or as a member of a poor community, have a serious and often detrimental impact on the way those people come to see themselves, and often comes to define the upper boundaries of how they view their potential for success.

When it comes to education, we simply cannot allow the story of a broken, hopeless system to persist. We cannot allow the story of education to be a set of predictable archetypes - the talented student who just needs to believe in themself; the teacher who wants to help them but has the whole world fighting against them - and a predictable set of outcomes - consistent failure with a few shining moments.

Education is how we transmit what it means to be a part of a community, a part of a country, a part of a global community. It is, particularly as the nature of work and life continue to change at an accelerating pace, a field that absolutely everyone has a stake in.

Let's start by stopping our questions about why someone would teach, and starting to ask how we can help.