[Author’s Note: This posting is quite spontaneous, as I realized that today marks the 4th anniversary of my establishing this blog, but that since that time, I had not published a subsequent post]
During a weeklong heat wave in 1995 that reached 106°, Chicago had over 700 more deaths than normal. While 8 of 10 of the community areas with the worst death rates were predominantly African American, suffered from high poverty and were plagued by violent crime, so were 3 of the 10 neighborhoods with the lowest death rates. What accounted, then, for the huge disparities in outcomes in neighborhoods that were so similar demographically?
Eric Klinenberger, an American sociologist and scholar of urban studies, culture, and media, has devoted about 20 years to figuring that out, along the way assisting governments in revolutionizing how they operate. In Palaces For the People (2018), he shared his discoveries. The answer he found is something he has named social infrastructure, defining it as “the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact…that determine if social capital develops” (p. 5), and that “promote civil engagement and social interaction” even, and especially, across group lines. Social infrastructure includes libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks and swimming pools. It also encompasses sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens and green spaces, and organizations such as churches, civic associations, and commercial establishments whenever they have an established physical space where people can regularly assemble.
Asserting that building real human connections requires a physical environment that is welcoming and accessible to people from all walks of life, Kleinenberg identifies what conditions in our common living spaces make it more likely that people will develop strong or supportive relationships as opposed to likely bringing about isolation and lonliness.
And how does this issue apply to the topic of liberality? One of the things that social infrastructure facilitates is conversation. Klinenberg (2018, p. 42) quotes Sherry Turkle of MIT emphasizing that conversing is how people “develop the capacity for empathy …[and]… experience the joy of being heard [and] understood,” and ‘advances self- reflection, the conversations with ourselves that are the cornerstone of early development and continue throughout life.”
As I shared in my inaugural blog post, David Norton (1996), established the term “liberality”, conceiving it as a virtue entailing “the readiness to affirm truth and value in systems of belief and patterns of conduct different from one’s own” (p. ix). And along those lines, he endorsed John Kekes view of imagination as “the internal exploration of what it would be like to realize particular possibilities…” (p.2). A crucial underpinning of “affirm[ing] truth and value” in belief systems and conduct different from ours is encountering them! Coming into contact with diverse others is important because, as Norton explains, “the personal properties that make up the actuality of the other are within each of us as possibilities”(p. 9). Social infrastructure promotes such crucial and formative interactions.
Klinenberg (2018) highlights how a library is one of the few institutions in which a senior citizen might reliably encounter a range of other generations. It is also a welcoming, family-friendly institution, which one can visit without having to purchase a product as would be the case at a coffee shop, for example. The author quotes of a librarian’s observation that “the library bestows nobility on people who can’t otherwise afford a shred of it” (p. 53).
In an online course I am taking through DePaul University offered by its Institute for Daisaku Ikeda Studies in Education, I learned of a book called The Good Society (Bellah et al. 1991) in the editor’s introduction to the Fall 2018 issue of Schools: Studies in Education (Kaplan, 2018). In it, he shares the authors’ definition of an institution as “normative patterns embedded in and enforced by laws and mores (informal customs and practices)” (Bellah at al 1991, 10–11),” going on to comment, “The patterns the authors have in mind consist of the ways in which we think, feel, and behave, and these ways in turn represent our complex interactions with each other and our experience of our heritage and traditions.”
One of the forms of social infrastructure, according to Klinenberg, is in fact the school. How can its impact become more positive? In the view of Gordon and Rajagapalan (2016), U.S. public schools’ established testing patterns need to be explored, and where necessary, modified. “In America today,” they write,” we test simply to assess the productivity of the educational system. This is not helping us improved the quality of education for our diverse student populations (p. 9). They also cite the Coleman et. al report (1966), “Equality of Educational Opportunity, which sought to understand the achievement gap between black and white students in the then-segregated schools, and add that about 50 years later,
we still struggle to achieve universal high-quality educational outcomes in diverse populations. We are only just beginning to understand diversity as a far more complex and universal phenomenon than black and white; today, American students come not only from many racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds but, like people in all societies, they also come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and family configurations, learn in different ways, and see the world through their own unique lenses (p.9).
While critiquing that “Some prevailing measurement models are anchored to our traditional commitment to meritocratic values rather than in pursuit of democratic opportunity and do not appear to be sufficiently engaging to or inclusive of students of different backgrounds” (p. 28), Gordon and Rajagopalan positively acknowledge the Common Core State Standards “for seeking to move the education effort toward the development of ‘deeper learning’ skills, which the National Research Council (2012) describes as thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, reflection, and communication, as these mental abilities are used in and outside of school” (p. 25).
From these brief thoughts, I hope the reader also agrees that social infrastructure is an important concept, and that supporting it deserves our serious attention.
References
Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. (1991). The Good Society. New York: Vintage.
Coleman, J. et. al (1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Gordon, E. W., & Rajagopalan, K. (2016). The testing and learning revolution: The future of assessments in education. New York: Palgrace Macmillan. [Chapter 2]
Kaplan, A. (2018). Editor’s introduction: The essential institution. Schools: Studies in Education, 15(2), 195-201.
Klinenberg, E (2018). Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help FIght Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York, NY: Crown.
National Research Council (2012). http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13398/education-for-life-and-work-developing-transferable-knowledge-and-skills
Norton, D. (1996). Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.