New norms for a new normal?

Times change. (National Library of Medicine)

In my work with adolescents, I like to remind them that they are active participants in creating the kind of culture they want to be part of.

"I'm only able to get up in front of the room and speak," I once told them, "because you're allowing me to. If you all started jumping up and down and screaming, there wouldn't be much I could do about it."

With norms based on shared values and trust, a community can exist. We assume goodwill and inhabit our agreed-upon roles, allowing for a peaceful and predictable day-to-day experience.

What happens when these shared values don't exist? What happens when trust can't be established?

You get a young woman physically intimidating a flight attendant and saying, "You don't have authority over me."

Or a dramatic increase in pedestrian deaths.

Or a world leader deciding that another country isn't actually its own sovereign nation and lying to justify his views and actions.

Or, day after day, a series of crushed clarinet ligatures on the floor of a colleague's middle school band room.

It's disturbing and sometimes even shocking to see the decay of trust in our communities and the norms that allow for safety and harmony. While my middle school students aren't jumping up and down and screaming, they do attempt to talk over me and each other in the classroom to a degree I've never seen in my twenty years in education. They argue with what is being taught. Some organize to mock or even plot against teachers or students they don't approve of.

I recognize the change in the air. My attempts to create a more humane academic environment — no grades, ready adaptation to students' learning differences, and a host of inclusivity measures — seem now to be inadequate. Ironically, some of the relaxed norms we favor, such as couches instead of desks in some of our classrooms and allowing students to be on a first-name basis with their teachers, seem to have confused students who spent a good portion of the last couple of years working remotely. They don't know how to behave differently at school than they do at home.

I'm certainly old enough now to do the "we're all going to hell in a handbasket" thing, but I am trying to approach the challenge with more curiosity. What can I learn from those who are disenfranchised, fed up, acting out, or impatient?

I'll never be on board with boundary-pushers like Putin, Xi Jinping, and Lukashenko. On the other hand, I recognize that some of the rules of society needed to go. We needed to change the way we deal with racism, homophobia, misogyny, and mental illness. We shouldn't prioritize work over well-being. And it's good that we're beginning to question whether "get good grades, go to a good college" is a universal recipe for success, let alone happiness.

I'm not giving up on kindness, but I understand that niceness and politeness don't always get the job done. Sometimes things have to fall apart in order to be remade.

And that's part of the reason I'm closing down my school: No matter how weird I try to be, I still have to link up with the traditional education system, and it can only ever be an uneasy compromise. I don't want to have to push against it anymore. After ten years, I want to try something new. The last thing I am looking for is to be part of the problem.

It is not and never will be okay to be a bully. But fighting oppression is necessary. The tricky part is when a person doesn't realize that they've gone from underdog to bully — or doesn't care. It happened to Castro, and it's happening right now to kids getting picked on in school.

So the work ahead of us, if we want to operate in a society or community, is to walk that line. How do we relieve oppression without inadvertently becoming oppressors? Which norms do we want to keep? Which ones do we want to throw out?

Whoever is stomping on those clarinet ligatures is frustrated with something and doesn't know how to channel it appropriately. How do we help that individual to get the help and support they need? What can we learn from their experience? And how might we change the structure of the system to prevent oppression, give people better emotional and communication tools, and help each other connect as human beings? Could we prevent the escalation of simmering discontent into violence?

No answers today, just big questions. I'm curious what you think.