Conflict, Silos, and Choice

One of the less common arguments in favor of school choice is that public schools are just a mess of conflict because people of different beliefs are forced to educate side by side. Wouldn't it be better if everyone could just go off into their own little silo and educate just with like-minded people?

Well, no. It wouldn't.

A couple of decades back, I went to Divorce School. The tuition is very high, and other people have to help pay the cost of your education, so I don't recommend it. But you can learn a lot there.

One thing I learned is that if conflict exists, you cannot disappear it somehow. What may feel like putting it off or tamping it down is really just putting it into an escrow account where it compounds interest and eventually emerges even huger than when you stuffed it in there. If the conflict exists, you are going to deal with it, one way or another, sooner or later. 

A common method for trying to disappear conflict is to try to make the people on the other side of the conflict just go away. Sometimes that takes the form of trying obliterate them in some sort of total victory, sometimes just erasing them somehow, and sometimes simply making them go away. 

The thing is, none of these work. All have been attempted on various scales, and none of them work.

A history of modern warfare, the first time in human history when leaders imagined that the technology existed to truly erase the enemy, shows that from the Third Reich to the middle east, policy based on the notion that the other side can be completely obliterated is failed policy that simply increases suffering and waste of human lives.

In the world of culture panic, we are seeing an attempt to erase certain folks. "Maybe," the theory goes, "if we just made everyone pretend that LGBTQ persons don't exist, we could end all the noise and conflict over that stuff." It's not working. It isn't going to work. 

The current rising love of authoritarianism is cut from the same cloth. If we just had a Really Strong Leader (like Viktor Orban or Putin) he would just make all those dissenting voices shut up forever. This comes with an attempt to Other the opposition, casting them as stupid and/or evil instead of other actual human beings that we need to talk to.

As Americans, we ought to know better. "Wouldn't everyone just be happier in their own place," is the language of segregationists. Segregated silos are bad news, particularly in a diverse pluralistic society.

The more obvious bad part of segregation is not just that diverse people are kept apart. Segregation of people facilitates segregation of resources. If your position is that you don't really want to pay to educate Black kids, then putting all the Black kids, and only Black kids, in the same schools makes it much easier to create policy that directs fewer resources to Black kids. Segregation also works for resource hoarding-- if we put all the rich kids in the same schools, then we can insure that only they benefit from certain privileges. 

But there are other problems with choicing our way to segregated silos. 

One is that every silo is a bubble, and within that bubble, stupid prejudices are free to grow. They're reinforced; say "All mugwumps like pineapple on their pizza" and a hundred heads will nod in agreement, and you'll be that more certain that those pineapple-eating mugwumps really are awful. 

Well, the argument goes, mugwumps will have a school of their own to eat all the pineapple pizza they like, so it's fair. I understand the reasoning. It just doesn't reflect what actually happens. What actually happens is that when marginalized students and families create a siloed option of their own, they turn themselves into easily-identified targets. Anti-LGBTQ folks don't have to say, "Well, those awful people are out there somewhere" and wave their hands vaguely about. They can--and repeatedly do--point at an LGBTQ-friendly charter or private school and declare "How can we allow that!!" Those echo chamber bubbles allow the worst ideas to fester and grow and, ultimately, explode.

Certain conflicts exist in our country right now. LGBTQ persons exist, and some folks wish they would not. Some folks want to keep working on our issues surrounding race and other folks would like to be done with all that. How do we manage religion? Where do we go with democratic norms in a pluralistic society? And why do some people put pineapple on their damn pizza?

The conflicts exist. Nobody wants them. Nobody likes them (though some folks find them useful). But they are here, and one way or another we will be forced to deal with them.

To pretend that we can create samethink silos for schools--or any other part of society--and thereby make our country a better place is a silly idea. We are a diverse, pluralistic country. If you just wish we weren't, well, I wish all my hair grew back, but we can't live the lives we wish we had, only the ones we actually have. 

A diverse pluralistic society based on democratic norms is going to have conflict, and we can either deal with it or let it curdle and mess with us. We're currently operating at a disadvantage, with a shortage of leaders willing to engage in difficult conversations, and we are certainly not going to create such leaders by raising generations in samethink silos. Yes, conflict is hard. Sometimes it's unavoidable. Suck it up and do the work, because there is no way out but through.