Tragedy of the School Commons

Posted on November 10, 2003 in Crosstalk Social Justice

Yule speaks to the concern of Timothy Burke, who was appalled by the behavior of a pack of twelve year olds who overran the Franklin Institute and mistreated his daughter. Timothy writes:

At the Franklin Institute, we found that there were about ten busloads of eight to twelve-year olds from the Philadelphia school system swarming over the exhibits. Anything remotely interactive was totally monopolized by them, often by the same five to six kids. Some of the exhibits they were doing their damnedest to break—there’s an exhibit on sports and physics that has a moving surfboard, for example, with a big warning that only one person should be on it, something that the eight or nine kids gleefully jumping on it together ignored.


We tried patiently waiting to use a few of the exhibits, in vain. One hulking twelve-year old even shoved my daughter out of a mock race car designed to measure reaction time and sneered defiantly at me when I objected.


The kids had adult supervisors, teachers I presume, but with one or two exceptions, they basically parked themselves on a bench and stared blankly into space.

Timothy goes on to promote more “discipline”, writing “as long as public life involves a contempt for rules, an acceptance of the tragedy of the commons as inevitable, and a deep tolerance for corruption and cronyism, it is neither rational nor reasonable to expect those who can opt out to opt in.”

Yule’s vigorous response I think points to another way of visualizing the problem:

…it’s not normal to lock kids up all day long with others of the same age. I don’t see how we can expect these kids to be able to behave “normally.” How would we adults feel if we were told that we could only associate with exact age-mates all day long, every day from Monday to Friday? How would we feel if that condition were then exacted: cut-off birth dates, exact ages only (within an 8-month margin), all day every day. That’s it, those are the only people you get to see from now on. The higher-ups would tell us we were being “socialised,” uh-huh. But we’d probably say something rude. After a few years, however, we would definitely forget how to behave around younger people and we would probably be afraid of older people.

Duh, that about sums up how school kids are socialised, and how many of them feel. They hate younger kids (because these remind them of their own lack of power) and are afraid of older ones (who typically show precious little empathy toward the younger ones).

I find this argument compelling. We’ve changed as a society from one where older children took an active part in teaching the younger ones to this age segregation. What kids aren’t learning is a sense of community, of feeling that they are part of the larger body politic. They’re boxed off as a ready-made “special interest” and they behave as if only their interests matter. As in politics, those with the most clout win the war of the special interests. In the adult life, our segregation is by class, by the money we have and by race. We’re trained at an early age — by our isolation from people who are different from us — to see ourselves as distinct and the community as something to be carved up. As in the case of the twelve year olds at the Franklin Institute, we either fight to grab the biggest possible piece — the home in Dove Canyon, the Jaguar, the private school, the time-share on Catalina.

The English commons went to pot when the Enclosures Act went into force. With fences came selfishness and a desire for personal plots that far outreached the immediate need of the individual. (It never did happen as it did in the classic free market myth. Village commonses were literally seized by the powerful. Everyone cooperated because that was what they had to do.) The tragedy of the commons in this day and age is that we’re brainwashed into strictly private thinking at every level, even in the places where we’re supposed to learn cooperation from our encounters with others.

Timothy, alas, is stuck in the thinking that has been outlined for him by the false teachings of history and the regimentation of our educational system.

It will take a reformer of considerable intellect and persuasive skill to undo this system and free minds. Can it happen in today’s heterogenerous society where the cardboard box of Self is king? The earth will have to quake for that to happen.