July 2020 Volume 2 Issue 11

We are All Graduates: Our Transition from the Old World

Diane Swiatek, Founder and Director of Banbury Crossroads School, Est. 1979

This is the usual time of year when we celebrate graduations from institutions of learning, which is a momentous example of a transition—meaning a time of alteration, or modification in circumstances and context. Woven into that idea of change is the concept of transformation, which I am using to refer to change within persons themselves, in their character, understanding and ability. There is an interplay between these two concepts of external and internal change. In this fluid world of 2020, change has been so drastic that some people joke about not liking it and wanting to take the year back to its beginning. We cannot, of course. It is here, for real. It is not only the school and university graduates among us who will be required to transform internally, in order to make adaptations to external circumstances. We all do. How appropriate that these concepts of transformation appear now, in the midst of our Covid-19 world. It is like we are all graduates of the Old World and are perched on the doorstep of a New Transitory World.

The transition we are experiencing has nothing to do with what we need as human beings. We still experience familiar necessities: food, shelter, education, physical fitness, social connection, work, recreation, cultural stimulation, rest, purpose, a healthy environment… well, everything. The transition involves simply how we get these needs met. The word of the year is “proximity”, for that is how we used to meet all of those needs, and now, aside from our intimacy with familial cohorts, we must meet them without it. And the reason for that shift is due to the “butterfly effect”, whereby, in the complex systems defining life on Earth, each little thing that people do, and that happens in nature, creates unpredictable ripple effects, both small and large, which can cross the world. Benjamin Franklin wrote these words, based on an old German and English proverb from the 13th and 14th centuries:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost, For want of a shoe the horse was lost, For want of a horse the rider was lost, For want of a rider the battle was lost, For want of a battle the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Covid-19 created a butterfly effect. Every individual has always had social responsibilities towards others, but now they also have the responsibility to transition effectively from that Old World into the New, non-proximal one.

Every aspect of our lives is being transformed to accommodate this one change relating to the lack of physical closeness. Children are vulnerable to any societal transition, and so are their parents. Parents who are working from home, and whose children are also at home needing academic support, engage in a juggling act. Since Banbury was faced with the conundrum of trying to help our parents deal with this double duty, our teachers maintained frequent, personalized contact with their students, both online and by telephone, so that the children would have their own educational direction to follow. This was hardest to accomplish with our youngest; yet, we are a Self-Directed Learning school, and our students are generally well-equipped to work independently. They also had hard copies of the work they were involved in. From one to three times a day, we contacted each one individually and within small groups, to make sure that they could progress academically and emotionally, as well as this situation allowed. We had one-on-one instruction, art classes, and mindfulness sessions on Zoom. The time involved in this computer-intensive contact kept our teachers hopping, and they felt exhausted. However, one silver lining to this cloud was that for quieter students, they felt free to share their feelings and thoughts in that context—with no other students listening—and the teachers cherished that closeness. The students did, too. Yet, social distancing was isolating for both teachers and students, who craved the connection, excitement and stimulation of person-to-person interaction. It was even worse in other schools, where we heard of some students who had “gone dark”. That was a distressing development: the teachers of those AWOL students felt helpless to force the parents to force their children to do school-focussed work. In the end, who knows what learning those dark students absorbed? They learned something, but it may not have been positive.

As I perused Banbury’s yearbook for 2019- 2020, its most outstanding facet was how Old World it was, in the pre-pandemic months before the outbreak. In those 7 months, life was dynamic and full of accomplishment. We enjoyed our treks within the community, absorbing plentiful evidence of art, science, math, culture and literacy. Internships were begun at AARCS and U of C. Plays were attended at Vertigo Theatre. Inside our walls, we sped around in the usual dance of learning, with our secondary students mentoring elementary students, with a Winter Camp crowding us with students from Korea, Viet Nam, China and Hong Kong, and with all of us carrying out projects together. We collected food bank donations. We collected ourselves together in knitting club, chess club, coding club, harp club and gym activities.

We shared valentines, and tea, and cuisine from the Foods class. We soaked up as much learning as we could in that wide world, both inside and outside the school’s walls, and we took it for granted. I know that now. We will never take that for granted in the same way again! Neither will we take for granted the various kinds of closeness we enjoyed—the hugs and contact sports, the story telling and problem solving, the singing and cooking, the Exhibitions and collaborative work—all done in sheer, natural, comfortable proximity.

Proximity. That is the key element missing now, in how we must fulfill our needs in the pandemic world. And even when places “open up” their restaurants, stores, sports arenas and theatres, proximity is still a danger. We are not pandemic savvy. The possibility looms of a worse second or third wave. Certain places tried opening up schools early, but in Quebec, some schools found themselves having to reverse track and close down again. Toronto mandated masks in public spaces. Florida, Arizona and Texas are awash with new cases. Some people have interpreted the desire to squash the virus with masks and social distancing as a government attempt to remove civil liberties. So, when they do not wear their masks and do not socially distance, they cavalierly put others at risk—but are pleased as punch that they are free of restraints upon their liberty. They do not realize that the definition of “liberty” is freedom combined with responsibility—the right to pursue one’s own goals, but only while respecting the right of others to pursue theirs. Freedom is not license—carte blanche to do whatever one wants without compunction for others. Proximity is missing now from our world, because it has to be.

So, this is our situation: as usual, we still need to seek knowledge and wisdom in order to understand our environment, and to solve problems realistically, bravely and creatively. We need to learn how to communicate and interact with each other as collaborators, to be humbly and rationally open to new information, and to be responsible. The challenge is that we need to do all of this without proximity. We can adapt to this reality, because we need to. These adaptations to issues of disease prevention will alter us down to our core, and they will influence our future interactions. We may never shake hands again.

In the schools of this country, we have all— every adult and child—been undergoing a process of transformation since the pandemic started, simply in discovering ways to meet our needs under the conditions of quarantine or social distancing. However, even before the pandemic, we were increasing our powers of critical thinking, of creative exploration and problem solving, as a matter of course. All along, we have been developing skills in empathy and communication that are crucial for displaying compassion for each other. These are the designed end-results of schooling. So, we are equipped to survive. We can shift readily into new frames of mind and new world views, built in response to our morphing environment. We can handle our amazing epiphanies, wild emotional distress, or quiet and steady realizations. Even our younger students have been gaining a wider perspective of the world around them. Banbury’s focus on self-directed learning specifically promotes the internal transformation from helplessness to self-efficacy that occurs naturally throughout childhood. We believe that the better the members of our community get at living proactively, with intention, the better we become able to show resiliency and social responsiveness, as well as to learn from our mistakes. This is the core of adaptability.

Darwin said that it is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive—it is the most adaptable. So, adaptation will strengthen people, young and old, to face the next waves of transition in our society, since more and more is in flux. Our graduates do not just face issues like the pandemic. Every issue that existed pre-pandemic is still present. Far from the future being some sort of variation on “The Jetsons” that children of my generation watched on TV decades ago, the future will in fact be quite different. Societal transitions are already beginning that will affect future diets and medical procedures, race relations, routes to knowledge acquisition, designs of cities and buildings, transportation for individuals and goods, and sources of energy. Our graduates are open to the idea of “finite” as applied to population growth and use of geologic resources. In their lifetime, they are still facing one of the most profound transitions in human history—the task of figuring out how to preserve, and continue to exist on, the only Earth we have. We have now proved to ourselves that we can change; the next change is to create a sustainably healthy relationship with this planet. We just have to survive the pandemic, hopefully in a shorter time than the seven years that the Bubonic Plague lasted. We have much work to do.

The Western society we have inherited, and also create, is now in a very rapid state of transition focused on health and disease containment,and its resultant economic resuscitation. No longer can the graduates of this year simply transition into a world full of guarantees. Some expectations that high school graduates had in the past are still expected: they usually attend some sort of post-secondary school, get jobs, form relationships with friends and families, work in the world contributively and for satisfaction, travel and enjoy recreation, and then retire. Some of these expectations are still reasonable, such as post-secondary education. In one form or another, similar to that of schools in general, universities and institutes of technology will still be offering classes, even if they are online, or blended onsite and online. Most of our graduates will attend these institutions, gladly. However, the kind of predictability that my parents’ generation, or even my generation, faced for this full progression of accomplishments is no longer there. This is especially true for employment, as the economic climate existing now in Alberta is undergoing its own transition.

It was, even before Covid-19 came along. There is a need for innovation in Alberta, with government support, to create other sorts of occupations not based on the carbon economy. We need to develop industries that focus on alternate sources of energy. Alberta needs to become known for something new, and this will only happen if intrepid entrepreneurs unleash their creativity and effort. There are fewer choices for new graduates now, particularly from universities and colleges. Many typical jobs are in a holding pattern, waiting to see how long the virus has a grip on us. It is difficult to visit potentialemployers, and it is inappropriate to shake their hands. Moreover, they are competing with experienced workers laid off from their previous jobs. When vulnerable graduates emerge in a year of recession, it is difficult enough; in a Covid-19 year that isalso a recession, it is a daunting challenge.

Employment is just the beginning to a person’s lifetime of contribution to their society. If work is perceived as meaningful, and provides authentically collaborative connections, it can be fulfilling. Today, however, desperation impacts many of these decisions. We all need to eat—but most of these graduates also need to pay back student loans. We have to be cognizant of what we end up choosing from the thousands of opportunities that we face every day. It is a quizzical paradox that we need to be, at the same time, both purposeful and “going with the flow”, in order to develop self-efficacy. At the same time, we

need to realize that each action matters, in some unknown way and forever, because it does. We also need to admit that we are only in charge of ourselves. As the outside world is a force unto itself, the best thing we can do is to self-initiate transformations, so that we can adapt. In the current societal climate, our graduates still need to question their paths, as all graduates have had to do before them. However, they will be doing so, while seeking opportunities that they may not have imagined before. They may enter interim careers, publish books, become consultants, or create their own work. We all know that there is much work to be done in the world, but it is not easy to create your own employment, especially without prior experience, and without seed money. The youth graduating from post-secondary now may need to be much more innovative, clever and courageous than previous cohorts of graduates, to wriggle their way into the world of work. I think they will be seminal in transforming both themselves, and the world that we all inhabit.

From a long-distance viewpoint, human beings are innovative, persistent creatures who are, as Kahlil Gibran observed, “the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself”. Somehow, we always find a way. We are all capable of small examples of determined innovation. Grandparents, stuck in nursing homes, have been greeted through their windows by their children and grandchildren who throw them kisses. Parents maintain isolation but change the location, by taking their children canoeing out to Two Jack Lake. And still, stalwart workers provide essential services that keep everything going for everyone else. Food stores and pharmacies make deliveries like never before. Garden centers deliver sand, dirt and compost for people to dig gardens out of their cultivated lawns or native fescue. People determinedly don their masks and gloves to enter stores safely, even if only to obtain splashes of pink petunias and scarlet geraniums for their pots and gardens. That spirit of persistent optimism arises like whack-a-mole, over and over, just when we feel like giving up. We can’t give up.

So, how do we all go forward? Along with the graduates among us, we need to think of our lives as a song, knowing that this phase is only one chorus of it. As Alan Watts explains in his video, “Why Your Life is Not a Journey”, the universe does not have a destination that you are trying to get to. Part of our ability to take responsibility for ourselves means deciding what will feel satisfying as we go through life. Instead of engaging in a constant drive for achievement, we need to keep the point in mind, that life IS the song. The point is not to just get to the end of the song, for the end of our life song is death. Obviously, the experience of our constant NOWS is the point. Life is a constant transformation. With full commitment, we must immerse ourselves in our current moments—whatever is happening, while it is happening, and no matter what is happening—simply because it is our life. This self-awareness is sure to enlist every shred of resiliency and resourcefulness that we have at our disposal. We will learn how to work under pressure, to keep designing dreams, and to be bold. Our actual graduates now celebrate the fulfillment of their old dreams and their realization of inner transformation coming. However, everyone is graduating from the Old World that still lies fresh in memory. Some of us, who have stared grief in the face, still need to heal from our scars. We all treasure our memories, yet we are also busy adapting. Once the dust of virus particles settles, we shall see where our transformations have led us.