Schools And Social Capital

I'm in the middle of reading Robert Putnam's new book (The Upswing) which has gotten me to thinking about his previous work, Our Kids. What has struck me in particular about the latter is his writing about social capital and the children of this country.

The definition of social capital is, in general, a little fuzzy. Putnam's, as put forth in Bowling Alone, another of his books well worth reading, is that it refers to "connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them." My own shorthand is to think of it as the ability to say, in any situation, "I know a guy."

Your child has expressed an interested in playing piano, and you have an old friend who plays, so you call up to ask about lessons. Your child says they'd like to know more about how the hospital works, and you know an administrator up there that you did some work for once. Your child is in trouble over some light theft, but you went to school with a guy in the prosecutors office, so maybe you make a call, or maybe you don't even have to because he says, "I know this kid's family. Let's go easy."

For someone with lots of social capital, there is always slack to be cut and always a large network of support on which one can depend. It is what we think about when we look back to a past where if you were a resident of tight community, a member of a squad, a part of the team, then somebody always had your back. To burn up all your social capital on foolish or untrustworthy or selfish behavior was to become a loner, a person who was flying solo through life, vulnerable to any bumps or disruptions along the way. 

Viewed through this lens, a lot of our formal education systems look like systems for creating and sharing social capital. Attending an ivy league college may provide you with an actual education, but it also provides you with a ton of social capital, connections to people who are both old schoolmates and occupants of positions of power. It also connects you to people who you never met because they passed through those ivy-covered halls decades before you did, but your association with the university carries enough capital to get them to open doors. You can earn extra social capital by belonging to certain organizations, certain clubs, certain civic groups. Greek organizations are explicitly about creating brother- or sister-hood that provides social capital you can carry through the rest of your life.

Conversely, a lack of social capital can be an impediment. You may have the job title, but if you didn't amass the capital on the way there, you may find yourself without admission to the "club." 

Not all groups come with the same social capital benefits. A Yale education gives you some hefty social capital; graduating from East Podunk Community College does not. In my little corner of the world, the high school you graduated from counts for your social capital account, but it's a very localized currency. Your high school mascot is good for a little help locally, but won't mean much in any other direction (at the same time, don't come into my small town waving around big city connections and expect anyone to perform an extra finger lift for you). And all of us are born into groups that come with varying degrees of social capital--rich families have more than poor, and I wonder if inborn social capital isn't another way to see white privilege. Social capital can also be built by creating a group where trust is enhanced because the members all share certain values.

There's a lot to chew on with the concept, but it makes me wonder what schools would look like if, instead of just centering on academic-based meritocratic striving, we also focused on building a strong bank of social capital. What if, in addition to prepping students to climb a ladder of success, we also primed them to build a web of success?

What could that look like?

Could we create social webs in the school that pushed students outside of their smaller tribes and lift up those students who are able to work across the school's cliquish boundaries? Can we design schools so that students know more of, and feel more connected to, their fellow students?

Can we boost mentoring programs, emphasizing not just the passing along of advice, but the building of connections. Can we draw back alumni whose success has given them a ton of social capital so that they can share their connections with students (many Hall of Fame type programs are an attempt to do this). It's a big ask, because we need more than just a one-day inspirational speech; we need the students to be able to say not just "I heard a guy talk" but "I know a guy." 

Can we commit to building an atmosphere of trust (an important part of social capital)? It can be done (take a look at Andrea Gabor's After the Education Wars), but it takes a deliberate top-down approach. 

Look at Teach for America--they built a model on collecting best-and-brightest ivy leaguers aka young folks flush with tons of social capital, and squeezed them together, in the process creating an organization also loaded with social capital-- a network that has allowed them to spread like educational kudzu. Imagine if every TFA temp had spent 5-10 years in the classroom and had spent a bunch of their social capital on their students. 

Teachers do get that opportunity to build and share social capital of a sort. Our students grow up and go out into the world and Do Things, and if we have connected with them as students, that turns us into people Who Know A Guy, like (hopefully) less extreme versions of Professor Slughorn. 

Schools are the second place that students have a chance to learn about building, maintaining, and using social capital (family is the first). Schools and teachers can help, simply by being more deliberate and mindful about that aspect of student growth. It is one of the processes that has been derailed by pandemicized distance learning, and in some communities, it will take some deliberate work to get things back on track. Of course, in wealthy, well-connected communities loaded with social capital, that social wealth is what has made the pandemic slightly more tolerable. 

Building social capital is not always a positive process (in particular, you can probably think of groups that build trust within the group by peddling the idea that nobody outside the group can be trusted). But when we start the process of rebuilding schools, a deliberate approach to social capital strikes me as a useful feature to include.