Pandemic Pods Are a Right

Freedom gets into the world through rights. When I pass Go in Monopoly, I have a right to $200 dollars. It doesn’t matter how much property I have or which token I use to represent my interests on the game board. Rights are also institution specific. I don’t get $200 when I round the board in every game, but I do in Monopoly.

Since I know my rights within the game of Monopoly, and I can expect the banker to know my rights within the game of Monopoly, I’m sanctioned to remind the banker to deliver $200 dollars to me when I pass Go, as we enjoy the game as Monopoly players.

In fact, this shared knowledge and mutual recognition is what allows us both to be Monopoly players. In this way, my self-determination as a Monopoly player depends not just on what I know about the game, but what the other person playing the banker knows, such that the banker voluntarily fulfills her responsibility to pay me as a Monopoly player.

This, in miniature, is how public education is legitimized in a modern nation, even if the institutions within which we participate are much more complicated than Monopoly. The added burden/blessing is that since the United States is a self-determining democracy, not a game whose immortal rules are handed down by Milton Bradley, the viability of the nation’s project depends not only on knowing the rules of the institution as they are, but also on everyone cultivating skills concerning how and why to change these rules in concert with others, in order to meet the nation’s internal and external demands of the moment. That’s it. That’s the purpose of public schooling.

We’ve built school houses were residents go to learn how to participate in America in all of its various and interconnected institutions of freedom.

Yet we didn’t design school buildings for a pandemic. We didn’t staff them for a pandemic. And we didn’t shape curricular and extra-curricular activities for a pandemic.

This situation leaves us with a physical infrastructure for public schooling for a public that no longer exists in its traditional form. Yet public education is still required to sustain American democracy, civil society, and our families as institutions of self-determination. We haven’t suspended freedom, and we still need the knowledge it takes to responsibly participate in and govern these institutions through which we realize our freedom.

So let’s close public schools as they stand. They are disease traps. But shunting the mandate for an educated populace to the magic of online schooling is a lazy dereliction of national duty. It’s a semblance of a solution relative to the import of public education for our nation, which is why middle class and wealthy parents are aggressively forming groups known as pods, paying private tutors, and retrofitting their boutique private schools to continue school through the pandemic.

Warning. I am going to use the word neoliberalism. The word gets thrown around, but neoliberalism is simply the extension of market principles to all aspects of life. It refers back to classical liberalism that found the market as a mechanism of escape from traditional duties, e.g., because of the blessings of the market, you no longer have to be a shoemaker just because your parents were shoemakers. However, neoliberal rationality transfers political sovereignty to individuals in civil society, but since it’s an illegitimate transfer of sovereignty that individualizes a fundamentally political project, any choice the individual makes is unjust and sustains political injustice.

Join a pod or don’t join a pod, but either way, know that being reduced to this degrading choice is a political failure.

Private pod culture poses a similar problem, except it transfers a political project onto the family. So join a private pod or don’t join a pod, but either way, know that being reduced to this degrading choice is a political failure that will reproduce racial and gender injustice.

The primary drama of this moment concerns what you are doing to pressure your elected officials to secure resources so that every American child has access to a safe, government funded pod, staffed by teachers as a matter of right in the next bailout package. The pods could meet in a leased hotel conference room, convention center, storefront, or community rec room. We are talking about ten students, a teacher, an assistant teacher, and a building manager to handle logistics, with logistics including check in, lunch delivery, and lock-up. For upper grades, we could move to a model where the students stay put and maybe three teachers move from room to room, with the teaching assistants staying put. Where do we get the employees, besides the tens of millions who are currently receiving unemployment? How about those furloughed from your local library, who could be leased to your local school district?

Here is the brief argument against mass online education: When people call it face to face education, they don’t understand what a face does. It communicates the soul/mind/spirit — whatever you want to call it, but it’s whatever separates a person from a corpse — of students who, almost by definition, don’t have the words and skills to communicate their inner frustrations through other means. Good teachers are good are reading the classroom. They judge students’ faces and body language to gauge comprehension to figure out what to draw out and how. The teachers adjust themselves to those circumstances.

How much of a teacher’s job is reading faces? (A lot)

If you are pushing for online education to be the sole public provider, you are simply not serious about teaching the lower 40 percent of America’s wealth bracket anything this year. Because online education ends with most them spending the year watching television, since the online modules do not teach themselves.

For these reasons, not only are pods a political right for the health of the nation, they serve as civil rights and gender justice securities, so that individual parents do not have to forsake their right to participate as individuals in civil society, including in the labor market but also volunteer social life, in order to stay at home and shepherd their children through the online curriculum. This mass demotion of parents to the level of mere parents, as opposed to parents who may also act as civilians exercising their rights both as parents at home and civilians in civil society, is going to disproportionately affect women.

Since our pandemic public education problem is ultimately a density problem, the proposal that your state and school district provide an infrastructure for pandemic pods addresses the density problem without propagating the fiction that online education through a system that massively demotes entire swathes of the productive workforce is an appropriate fix that sustains freedom within the pandemic.

Through providing universal, secure access to public pandemic pods, we provide public education as a right for all, not a privilege for the wealthy. This may be the civil and political rights fight of 2020. This is what we should advocate for in our next pandemic relief bill: a federal subsidy to school boards to create and sustain an infrastructure so that all students have access to pandemic pods as a right.