The Intellectual Virus Fueling America’s Pandemic Response (And The Underutilized Vaccine For It)
Ironically our understanding of health has expanded even as our collective health has declined.
Fight or Flight, Ventral Vagal, and Dorsal Vagal are no longer foreign words to many of us (especially the 48% of us stressed out parents)!
We are finally talking about our nervous systems. There are seemingly endless courses and modalities for learning how to support them, from toning your vagus nerve to cold exposure, breathwork, and more.
The pandemic has negatively impacted my ability to “regulate” and “coregulate,” so I’ve benefited greatly from learning some of these practices.
For me, strengthening my ability to dynamically inhabit responses that serve my body, mind, and spirit is the foundation of health that is not visible or easily measured from the outside.
Physical, mental, social, emotional, financial, spiritual, and occupational health have all been included in the dimensions of health and wellness for quite some time.
But what about our intellectual health?
While it is sometimes considered an 8th dimension of health, my guess is most of us don’t think of it at all much less give a second thought to improving or intentionally developing it as part of our health and wellness.
The way schools engage in the development of our intellectual lives might provide clues to this omission.
No matter how hard the many committed and talented people inside these systems (including parents and kids) work each day to improve education for our children, our systems rarely identify, much less prioritize, the need to focus on intellectual health. Despite all the reforms of the past few decades (all that work and what did it get us?), test scores remain the priority.
Before you lash out in defense of schools and educators, let me say that I have spent most of my professional life working in schools considered to be over-challenged and underresourced. I have taught in them, led them, and trained them—from small rural schools on the West Coast to the largest school systems on the East Coast. I have endless big fish stories, street cred, and metaphorical deaths on the hills of reforms designed to increase equity.
So, I am not debating the value of public education or how hard teachers work. I know that firsthand. I also have witnessed and been part of the “exception to the rule”. The problem is that the “exceptions” are usually unsustainable, and it sets us up for increased inequity when we use those who successfully battle systemic resistance as evidence that the overall system is working.
We have a long history in this country of using the stories of remarkable teachers as proof that everyone can get extraordinary results in classrooms, no matter the odds stacked against them. You’ve seen the movies about them, and I have too. They and the countless educators like them deserve to be celebrated but they should not be used as part of a permission structure to accept the current state of education in America.
Schools through the Lens of Piaget and John Taylor Gatto
Schools are not places that foster the intellectual health of students, staff, or the community.
Unless you get lucky. And that’s not enough.
I believe that the impact of our education system on adults' thinking and decision-making capacity and the pervasive connection of school culture and policies to almost all parts of American society today is actively contributing to our abysmal response to the pandemic.
“If we’re going to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate”; that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.”
- John Taylor Gatto
Piaget, the renowned Psychologist famous for his theory of cognitive development, would likely concur given the current state of things, and his theory explains why this is the case at a fundamental level1.
Our schools overfocus on Learning (an increase in content) and neglect development (a structural change). When Piaget observed children’s behavior, he was looking for structural differences because he was interested in the structure of thinking, not in the content of what a child remembered.
The lockstep, standardized nature of most schools interrupts the ability of students to engage with tasks at the appropriate level of task difficulty, thereby forcing them to assimilate information at the available level of comprehension rather than create new understanding, all of which adds confusion, and over time creates the habit of separating thinking from learning.
Our schools are language-heavy AND sedentary. For all the reform efforts over the years to get kids moving and outside, the center of gravity (yes, even in pre-k and K all too often) is being seated and attending to language-heavy tasks for most of the day. However, according to Piaget, “to reach the intellectual stage where a person can function comfortably with verbal propositions, the medium of actions and physical encounters is appropriate; whereas a premature emphasis on language as a prime medium for thinking is bound to result in low-level activities that do not nourish intellectual development.”2 (just think about a pre-K mandated “calendar time” If you don’t believe me, check out this account).
We overfocus on extrinsic motivation and all but neglect intrinsic motivation, which Piaget indicates is an obstacle to the development of thinking.
Piaget’s theory indicates that development does not fit into a model of a standard norm with a consistent cumulative increase, as our schools still say it does in their actions. Rather, Piaget recognizes lawful and meaningful stages in development and respects the tremendous range of normal variability.
His theory is coextensive with all areas of life and is not restricted by arbitrary divisions, unlike the design of our schools.
John Taylor Gatto, the controversial school critic and prolific author of books like The Underground History of American Education, Dumbing Us Down, and Weapons of Mass Instruction, describes The 7 Hidden Lessons of Compulsory Education as:
1. Confusion
Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating and disconnections of everything. I teach too much: from the orbiting of planets to adjectives. Curricula are full of internal contradictions and lack coherence. Kids leave school without one genuine enthusiasm or in-depth appreciation of anything. Human beings seek meaning, not disconnected facts.
2. Class Position
I teach students they must stay in the class where they belong. If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else because I have shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and to have contempt for the dumb classes. The lesson is everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and you must stay where you are put.
3. Indifference
I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. I do this by demanding students become totally involved in my lessons, exhibit enthusiasm for my teaching, and compete with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings, I insist they drop whatever they’ve been doing and proceed to the next class.
4. Emotional Dependency
By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. Individuality is a contradiction to class theory and a curse to all systems of classification.
5. Intellectual Dependency
Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. They learn that we must wait for others, better trained, to make the choices that will direct our lives. successful children do the thinking I assign with a minimum of resistance and decent show of enthusiasm. Curiosity has no place, only conformity. Bad kids fight this, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting. There are procedures to break the will of those who resist. Our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren’t trained to be dependent. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do.
6. Provisional Self-Esteem
It is impossible to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world wouldn’t survive a flood of such spirits, so I teach that a child’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but rely on the evaluation of certified officials.
7. One Can’t Hide
I teach children they are always under constant surveillance. There are no private spaces for children, no private times. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other. The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted; privacy is not legitimate. Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control.
Gatto finds that this “curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis and that no curriculum of content is sufficient to reverse its effects. “
Mass education cannot support democracy cannot support a fair society because its daily practice is rooted in competition, suppression, and intimidation. The schools can’t teach the nonmaterial values that give meaning to life because the structure of schooling is held together by rewards and threats, carrots and sticks–“the paraphernalia of servitude, not freedom.”- John Taylor Gatto
I would love to tell you that my experience as a student, teacher, principal, and consultant was different, but it was not. I remember my first reprimand as a student teacher well; it was for not using the well-oiled carrot and stick machine my supervising teacher had spent years developing. So when I pause to reflect on all of these things, the sad truth is that our collective pandemic response is par for the course.
Remember this amazing quote from 2020?
We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” - Sonya Renee Taylor
For a brief shining moment in 2020, many of us lifelong educators hoped that we would be able to seize the moment to confront longstanding issues we had previously found impossible to change. Sadly, it seemed we simply doubled down on all the old binaries rather than engage in the complicated, heavy lifting of the “both ands” that held the promise of a new garment.
The Intellectual Virus of Binary Thinking
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”- F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Perhaps we all have first-rate minds, but instinctual thought processes and institutions built upon primitive fear-based thought processes are holding us back”3
While they didn’t start the fire by any means, nor are they responsible for it’s existence in the roots of our country, schools ARE the epicenter of binary thinking in the United States of America. We all need to be able to solve problems with either-or solutions and wrestle with complicated both-and tensions (also known as polarities or wicked problems). But even after all the Common Core Reforms, designed in part to move away from the one-right-answer simplicity of assessment and instruction, our schools still live in the land of yes or no, good or bad, right or wrong, win or lose binaries. Not much, if any, effort is devoted to wrestling with complexity and opposing points of view. Yet this is the struggle that would build our ability to see and value the Other, strengthen our intellect, and be able to make wiser decisions both now and in the future.
One of my favorite mentors used to say, "If you’re confused, get ready—you are likely about to learn something." Unfortunately, only the luckiest of us had the chance to experience that kind of confusion and disequilibrium, the kind Piaget identified as a critical component of learning.
“Confusion is an emotion that correlates with learning gains because it is diagnostic of cognitive disequilibrium, a state that occurs when learners face obstacles to goals, contradictions, incongruities, anomalies, conflicts, and system breakdowns. Cognitive equilibrium is normally restored after thought, reflection, problem solving and other effortful cognitive activities. Therefore, pedagogical tactics that challenge, perplex, and productively confuse learners are stimulating alternatives to the typical information delivery systems that promote shallow knowledge in the comfort zone of the learner, but rarely deep comprehension.”- Art Graesser, Sidney D’Mello
The combination of the mismatch between the design of our schools and what development of the intellect actually requires, according to Piaget, is a significant problem in and of itself. But when you add to it the emphasis on teaching control and order, described by Gatto as our national curriculum “from the Hollywood Hills to Harlem”, it certainly seems to be the literal definition of an institution “built upon primitive fear-based thought processes.”
“Binary thinking appears to be a collection of mechanisms that have outlived their usefulness and are now impediments to sophisticated thinking in a sophisticated world.”4
What better place to perpetuate limited thinking than schools that are still operating on the outdated factory model of education?
The Fallacy of the Excluded Middle
The implications of how this long-term and current problem is impacting our pandemic response are fairly obvious, but as a Still Coviding parent, I’ve come to see our role in this pandemic drama through the lens of binary thinking being applied by the masses.
We are seen as people who must be dismissed, invalidated, or even discriminated against BECAUSE we are the representation of a third way, a way out of the “either we lock down again lane” OR “we live like it’s 2019 lane”.
Philosophers call this the fallacy of the excluded middle.
That’s us.
The excluded middle who doesn’t fit into either-or choices.
Whenever we engage in the larger community or world with our personal mitigation practices, even if we don’t request that others follow them, we represent a middle way or a third option. You don’t have a real choice if there are only two options. By living out a third one in public view, we suggest by our very presence that they are actively choosing something that’s pretty scary, whether they can admit it or not. The irony of a COVID-cautious citizen being the least threatening to any member of the public on a transmission level and the most threatening on a psychological level is not lost on me.
But I think we get into trouble by immediately identifying people on the other side as harboring ill intent towards us personally or assuming something is “wrong with them.” Look what most of us have been conditioned to do, “if under ordinary circumstances the level of a problem is too high, the child responds to it in a typically psychologically healthy fashion: he ignores it or turns the problem into a different problem which he then can tackle.” 5 Sound familiar? It seems as if the anti-Piagetian design of our schools, wherein the complexity of tasks is not matched to the learner, and we defer to a standardized, lockstep march through curriculum steadily building anti-thinking habits, is coming back to bite us big time.
We are living in a moment when all the powers that be, from government officials and lawmakers to public health agencies, school superintendents, the media, business owners, and all the rest are taking an incredibly complex constellation of problems and repeatedly turning them into the most simplistic solutions imaginable. Vax and relax is proof enough. But schools, with the “help” of the CDC, are vying for first place in the contest of showing off how poorly they can respond by ignoring the actual level of the problem and making it something they can “tackle”.
Too much absenteeism? Should we strategically leverage all of our knowledge about clean air and take informed action? Maybe develop new pandemic-informed policies around absenteeism that don’t penalize parents, schools, and kids for staying home (and encourage rest and recovery based on all the research that indicates this could decrease the chance of Long Covid occurring?) Nah, that’s waaaaay too complicated and hard. Let’s make it simple: (Drumroll)…..how about just coming to school while actively sick? As a matter of fact, go ahead and come with lice, with mild diarrhea, whatever works to get you in the seat! Nothing to see here… our absenteeism problem has been solved!
If that’s not enough, here is some more fuel for my argument that an intellectual virus is fueling the dumpster fire of our pandemic response:6
Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we experienced a binary thinking disaster, riddled with existential fear, binary moral framing, and a media that flooded us with information but reduced sophisticated issues to simple binaries.
America’s public dialogue is once again limited to “whether or not” versus “how best the country should react” just as it was after 9/11. This is why we are still arguing about whether COVID-19 is over or not. If the quality of your life is driven by the quality of your questions, no wonder we are living in a collective hellscape.
The more complex the situation, the more attractive a simplistic moral binary framing can be.
Facing society’s many paradigms creates enormous cognitive loads. Reactionary binary oppositional thinking and framing are forms of cognitive dissonance that free the individual from the heavy lift of resolving intellectual and moral dilemmas.
None of this is intended to blame schools or educators for the misinformation campaigns and literal manipulation of the public conducted by just about all the “powers that be” since this started, not just in the U.S.A. but globally. Rather, it is to say that the intellectual virus that is perpetuated in our school systems is the reason we haven’t been able to persuade the masses to see through it all and take collective action to stop it.
Are Still-Coviders Immune?
I’m sure some gentle readers may be thinking, well, we went to the same kind of schools here, so why are the Covid Cautious choosing a 3rd/middle way instead of picking an either-or option? There are likely as many reasons for that as there are members of our community, so I can’t say what combination of factors is yours.
But it is important to note that as Still Coviders, we are not immune to the intellectual virus of overfocusing on binary thinking and neglecting both-and thinking. Anytime you see the comment section getting heated on a social platform of like-minded Covid Cautious individuals, it is likely being driven by a binary position being asserted by one or more individuals.
This shows up often in discussions around homeschooling, where anyone voicing challenges with their children’s schools is sometimes abruptly told they should remove them from school—as if that is available to everyone without question.
That type of response is evidence of not seeing a third option and engaging in binary thinking. Parents who are straddling the worlds of COVID-19 caution and 2019ers are on the front line of demonstrating that things can be different. If you notice yourself telling them to get in your lane (e.g., homeschool them), don’t feel justified about it just because we (including them ) believe it’s safer than the “live like it’s 2019 lane” of life.
Given what we know about transmission and conditions in schools, parents/taxpayers should be focusing our advocacy and action on ensuring that schools provide the mitigations we know will protect lives. If we, whether currently homeschooling, unschooling, or traditional schooling, can zoom out of the current moment and imagine our kids inhabiting a world with their peers who might experience these unprotected spaces without the mitigations of covid cautious parents themselves for years to come, we might be spurred to new action.
Many people in our Still Coviding groups are doing incredible work on their own and with larger advocacy groups to transform the situation in our schools. If you are one of them, please feel free to comment with your contact information and how people could help. If you are reading this and moved to join in, a good action step might be to reach out to anyone who comments or is mentioned here, or anyone you see in your social media groups, and ask how you can help OR even just provide some validation and encouragement to them in this critical uphill battle.
Anger AND Joy
I love reading OK Doomer, but the essay “Are You Angry? It Means You’re Smart” was another example of how we, even in our own community, engage in either-or thinking.
The first line was, “Joy doesn’t work.”
I get the point. But the truth is we need ANGER and JOY. The key is knowing how to move between them to sustain ourselves and experience positive emotions even while we fight for systemic reforms.
During 2020 we were gifted with many examples of BLM activists who shared their anger AND the power of black joy and rest as an important part of life and as necessary fuel for activism.
As usual, the OK Doomer essay delivers an important and timely message, but I think it’s critical that we consider how insidious our tendency to categorize things into binaries has become.
Good News: The Vaccine Is Well Known and Proven to Innoculate Against Binary Thinking
It is possible to reverse this virus.
Seeing our systems reflect the change may take longer than our lifetimes, but we must start now for the kids and the future.
This “vaccine” requires intention, commitment, and practice in swimming upstream, not in our counter-cultural mitigation practices (we are already pros at that), but behind the scenes in our minds, our thought patterns, and responses.
A Paradox Mindset is the vaccine for this intellectual virus, and it requires that we:
Start asking ourselves if we are missing the “middle” by applying an either-or to a situation that is not binary in nature. Practice reflecting on this as you read posts and comments on social media. Just to be clear, “the middle” does not mean compromising our standards or safety by meeting in the middle- it means in the context of this essay for example, a parent who is Covid-Cautious AND their child attends public school in person that is a “middle” in this case. They are combining mitigations WITH in-person attendance in a world where people have basically said you either homeschool/unschool/virtual school OR you drop mitigations and proceed with your child’s education as if it is 2019.
Develop curiosity about what might be creating a particular response within an individual rather than attaching a blanket assessment or considering them to be a “trope”.
Commit to learning about polarities/wicked problems and how to identify and use them in your daily life to improve your intellectual health and reduce conflict in school environments and other institutions where we face lots of resistance as Still Coviders. *more on this in a future essay
No matter how grim the situation appears, it’s still not too late to “stitch a new garment… one that fits all of humanity and nature”. I think focusing our “stitching” on schools- both the ones our children attend and the ones they do not is an excellent place to start.
P.S. I think it’s important to shout out one of the best things we’ve experienced in the pandemic. We found a needle in a haystack! Prisma is a virtual school for Grades 4-12 that has conceptualized a new way to develop “thinking” and intelligence that is creative, joy-filled, and highly engaging even in a virtual environment. Our son graduated already, and I have no affiliation with them professionally or personally. I just can’t help but share something amazing when I find it.
Furth, Wachs, Thinking Goes to School: Piaget’s Theory in Practice (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975)
Furth, Wachs, Thinking Goes to School: Piaget’s Theory in Practice (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975)
Bishop, Kevin Robert, AMERICAN BINARY THINKING: PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS, RELIGIOUS FRAMING, AND MEDIA REINFORCEMENT, (Georgetown University, 2023) https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1082660/BISHOP_georgetown_0076D_15413.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Bishop, Kevin Robert, AMERICAN BINARY THINKING: PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS, RELIGIOUS FRAMING, AND MEDIA REINFORCEMENT, (Georgetown University, 2023) https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1082660/BISHOP_georgetown_0076D_15413.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Furth, Wachs, Thinking Goes to School: Piaget’s Theory in Practice (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975)
Bishop, Kevin Robert, AMERICAN BINARY THINKING: PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS, RELIGIOUS FRAMING, AND MEDIA REINFORCEMENT, (Georgetown University, 2023) https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1082660/BISHOP_georgetown_0076D_15413.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
“For a brief shining moment in 2020, many of us lifelong educators hoped that we would be able to seize the moment to confront longstanding issues we had previously found impossible to change.”
I really felt that. We had such an opportunity to change things. To ask ourselves whether the world was the way we wanted it - the way that made sense. And then we just doubled down on the “normal” of the before times and most people haven’t looked back.