One of a Kind
From binaries to spectrums, and the lessons we are learning along the way.
(Expected reading time: 15 minutes.)
Dear Brilliant Reader,
This week in Build Notes, we are taking a look at the transition from thinking about ourselves in binaries of that or not that, toward thinking about ourselves existing on spectrums (or spectra) of infinite variety.
This is a huge shift in how we form community together. It puts a ton of stress on Modern-era institutions. Most of them will not survive this shift, at least not in their current forms.
In the back half of the essay, we will look at how this evolution is putting some very specific stresses on schools and teachers right now. We will then close with some starter ideas for rethinking Postmodern education from A Pattern Language.
Are you in or out?
The Modern era gave us some truly great ways of categorizing things. Our forebears created taxonomies for describing the physical world, like the periodic table, and the classification of the animal kingdom into species. With the development of computers in the 19th and 20th centuries, we figured out how to use electronics to store information as bits, represented by ones and zeroes. Today we live in a world that is literally defined and described by binary data - endless strings of ones and zeroes, on or off, present or absent.
This way of thinking has also shaped how we think about ourselves as human beings. We use endless tools and tests to categorize people as male or female, straight or gay, tall or short, sick or healthy. We can measure ourselves with scales and blood tests and doctors’ expert opinions to decide if we are normal or abnormal.
In our communities, we might have cause to categorize ourselves as Democrat or Republican, member or non-member of a group, donor or not, parent or not, partnered or not. Some categories have more than two options, like when you identify your race in a survey, but the intent is always the same: Someone is deciding whether we are in or out.
We rarely receive these categories as neutral. Many of them carry a heavy weight of judgment: Winner or loser. Giver or taker. Helping or helpless. Categories tend to imply some amount of permanence, a fixedness in your identity. They also imply that the differences between categories are important to know, are meaningful, and are worth the effort to define and enforce.
All around us, as mentioned before, we have seen an explosion of variety in the world. The humble Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, to give one tasty example, now exists in dozens of flavors, shapes, and sizes. We can already feel how overwhelming this is for our brains to manage.
But now, we also see binaries of identity and affiliation changing in our communities. We have kids and adults changing their own names, gender presentations, and sexual identities. We talk much more openly than ever about gender fluidity and neurodiversity, and how our experiences of these differences affect our individual and collective mental health. As people have left behind the rigid boundaries of their religious and ethnic in-groups, and as marriages between different races and the same sexes have become legal and more common, we have seen a great intermingling of cultures, religions, ethnicities, and races.
My friend Cliff has observed that for younger people, everything in their lives exists on a spectrum rather than a binary. Categorizing each other has become much, much more complicated than it used to be, simultaneously more and less important.
Did we actually change that much? Surely not. But what is clearly changing is our collective willingness to confine ourselves to binary categories. Glennon Doyle observes, in her book Untamed:
“It’s like water in a glass. Faith is water. Religion is a glass. Sexuality is water. Sexual identity is a glass. We created these glasses to try to contain uncontainable forces. Then we said to people: Pick a glass - straight or gay. So folks poured their wide, juicy selves into those narrow, arbitrary glasses because that was what was expected. Many lived lives of quiet desperation, slowly suffocating as they held their breath to fit inside. Faith, sexuality, and gender are fluid. No glasses - all sea.”
As we have moved from Modern to Postmodern life, from glass to water, we have shifted from “one size fits all” to “one of a kind” - and people all around us, along with the institutions they inhabit, are clearly struggling with this shift.
What’s so bad about snowflakes, again?
It’s wild to me that we live in an age when beautiful things from the natural world, like rainbows and snowflakes, have become so politically charged. Merriam-Webster notes that “snowflake” has become a disparaging term for someone regarded or treated as unique or special, or someone who is overly sensitive.
Uniqueness is a problem, to the Modern-era mind. (We also loaded up the term “special” in prior generations with unpleasant connotations, but we aren’t going to get into that just now.)
Someone who asserts their uniqueness is rejecting their “proper” place within categories that are defined and managed by in-groups for their own needs, and according to their own incentives. This is where the second part of the definition, someone who is overly sensitive, comes into play. Anyone who expresses pride or joy from their placement in a designated out-group category represents trouble. A threat to the “natural order” of things.
In nature, of course, snowflakes pose absolutely no threat to each other, or to the natural order of anything. They simply exist, in their infinite diversity, forming fluffy snow so we can sled down hills and then drink hot cocoa. The world is big enough to contain all of them, all at once.
Our scientific knowledge has slowly turned toward an awareness of Postmodern realities - that infinite variety can co-exist, that such variety is essential to thriving, and that on the level of quantum behavior of particles, multiple states of reality can exist at the same time. Nature has no particular problem accepting all of this. But our Modern-era mindsets, given to us by Modern-era institutions, make no space for the variety or flourishing of snowflakes.
The variety, and the flourishing, are happening anyway.
The party don’t start ‘til I walk in
Maybe the best example of panic at the Postmodern disco is TikTok, the infamous social media app. We’ve now lived with literal years of drama about TikTok getting shut down and banned, getting forced to sell to a US company, getting its CEO dragged in front of Congress to explain all the dancing. In a previous project, I even interviewed one of my own kids about it.
Why does this app, uniquely among social media platforms, cause so much consternation among our aged elites? The Chinese ownership structure is… not great, for reasons, and also represents a significant threat to American (perceived) soft power through technology.
But I would argue that for all the kerfuffle about TikTok’s ownership and the worries about spying and blackmail, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that TikTok has perfected the algorithmic experience of uniqueness. When they say For You Page, they mean it. TikTok’s algorithm is spooky good at narrowing down what it shows you to your particular interests, sense of humor, location, and more.
Google has some of these powers with search, and Facebook/Instagram make their own sweaty attempts, which tend to feel either creepy or badgering. Netflix, Amazon, and many others have been working for years on refining their recommendation algorithms, based on what they know you already like. TikTok is really the first platform we’ve seen that completely clears all the extraneous stuff from view. It’s just you and your feed.
Boomer management guru Tom Peters has said that your best experience in one part of your life will set the bar for your standards everywhere else. If the best customer service you ever see is at Disney World, well, that’s now your expectation of the kid at Wendy’s.
TikTok is significant because it is setting the standard for individual differentiation - the ability to show you what you, and only you, want to see. Paradoxically, in creating an in-group of one, TikTok makes space for each user to feel fully represented, with infinite and unlimited variations from person to person.
And then, of course, your average TikTok user closes the app and heads to school.
School of One
We have a lot of schoolteachers in my family. My grandfather on my Dad’s side taught middle school math for 30+ years. My sister is also a middle school math teacher. Her husband teaches high school chemistry. Three more of our cousins from Dad’s side of the family also teach in K-12 schools. A few more of us are not in the classroom right now, but have worked part time as educators in K-12 or college settings.
Friends, the teachers are stressed. COVID created a lot of obvious challenges. But schools are still largely running the same way they did 100 years ago and more, and they are struggling mightily to adapt to the demands of the Postmodern era. This problem of individual differentiation, which TikTok manages so well as an algorithm, is pretty much impossible to manage effectively in a Modern-era classroom setting. How could it be? For all the emphasis on smaller class sizes and individual attention, the economics of American education simply don’t work with classes smaller than about 10-15 students.
I served on the board of my kids’ school for 11 years. I lived with this reality as both a parent and as someone looking after the institution overall. Schools of all sizes and levels like to say that they are capable of meeting each child where they are. I have no doubt of their sincerity. But the obstacles to delivering on that promise just keep piling up to overwhelming levels.
Take, for instance, the question of how best to serve transgender students. Setting aside politics and bathrooms and sports teams for a moment, let’s think about names. It is common for a transgender student to change their own preferred name as an expression of their gender identity. Most schools these days are comfortable with distinguishing between a student’s given name - what my kids call their “government name” - and their preferred name. In database terms, that’s just a matter of adding one more field. Easy. Everyone sets about using the student’s new preferred name on documents, report cards, and so on.
Now, suppose that same kid changes their mind - which is not unusual. They might go back to their original name and gender identity, or they might progress onward to another one. Does your database support a complete and nondestructive history of names and gender identities? Do we have a mechanism in place for recognizing that the Katie of 3rd grade is the Kyle of 7th grade, and the Klay of 10th grade? What if the kid in question attended school in three different buildings or divisions in those years, each with different teachers and staff? What if the kid only wants to use their current preferred name at school, but not with their parents?
Who is keeping track of all of this, and how?
These questions of transgender student support are important, but in terms of individual differentiation, they’re just scratching the surface.
Kids with different neurotypes have vastly different needs for instruction and testing. Tracking, the practice of grouping kids into classes based roughly on perceived academic ability, was meant to address these needs, although it often resulted in de facto racial segregation of classrooms, and fell out of favor in the late 20th century. But now, we live in an era of widespread IEPs, which applied to an estimated 15% of all US public school students in 2022-23, the highest proportion ever. IEPs are (in theory) a much finer-grain method for accommodating individual students’ needs. But there is considerable tension in the system over whether IEPs are being used effectively, or even whether this system can deliver on the committed accommodations at all.
Meanwhile, we have seen endless variety also showing up on the teaching side of the equation. Comedians love to do routines about the new math. But when I was a kid, we all learned one way - the same way - of doing long division. My sister casually mentioned to me last year that there are now six different ways they teach division in her classroom. Six!
Teaching in a classroom today requires you to hold an extraordinary amount of complexity in your own head. You need to keep track of each student’s current preferred name and pronouns, IEP accommodations, which kind of division works best for them, on and on and on. You must hold space for infinite variety, both your students’ and your own. And you must hold all of this space while the powers that be are wreaking havoc on your job and workplace.
To be clear: Holding space for human complexity is right and good. Truly meeting kids (and adults!) where they are, giving them the opportunity to be one of a kind, is exactly what we should do. Even if we didn’t like it for some reason, it is impossible to go back to the old Modern ways. People will certainly try, and they will attempt to use state-sanctioned violence to enforce a regression. And even then, such a rear-guard effort will eventually fail. That isn’t stopping a lot of people in power from making the attempt right now. But the result is already guaranteed: It will fail. The only question is how long it takes, and how many people get hurt in the meantime.
The problem when it comes to individual differentiation is that our institutions are not resourced properly for this. In education and healthcare, two of the places where we need the most individual differentiation, we face structural cost problems we haven’t yet figured out how to resolve in a capitalist system. (Spoiler alert: The type of capitalist system we’re running might be the problem itself.)
Many smart people have seen this problem coming, and they have done the usual Modern-era smart people things to try and solve it. The solutions have fizzled, because they are nibbling at the edges without really changing the core of the Modern institution of school.
In 2009, New York City piloted something called School of One. The idea was to use technology and new ways of teaching to create individual differentiation for math students. At the time, Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly recognized the human need for personalization, as he called it, and wondered if School of One could make a meaningful difference for kids like him.
If only. The high water mark of the program was 2,300 enrolled students, out of roughly 1 million students in the NYC school system. Many millions of dollars went into School of One, and today, known as Teach to One, it is used at just 3 schools in New York.
Patterns for learning
We need to switch up the game.
The original Pattern Language book has three patterns directly related to school:
(43) University as Marketplace
Taken together, they represent a really solid start on envisioning the shape of an educational system that could rise to the challenges of Postmodern life.
Network of Learning recommends: “Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a fixed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups traveling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process. … Build new educational facilities in a way which extends and enriches this network.”
If we have a cost and resourcing problem that currently appears unsolvable, we need to engage our communities’ resources in a fundamentally different way. We are a country of 330 million people, living in a $30 trillion economy. We have more than enough resources to solve this and every other problem we face - but not the way we’re currently organizing and using them.
There will be a temptation to solve all of this with software, perhaps believing that AI will square the circle on our resource shortage. As someone who has worked my whole career in technology, and went to a super techie school… I dunno, man. My read on technology is that so far, we are mostly using computers to manage people as if we are just more machines. There will be ways to make technology work for us. But until we’ve tackled some of the current tech industry’s profound issues related to incentives, rent-seeking, and abuse of out-groups, it might be better to look for other solutions.
A whole spectrum of them, even.
Next week, we launch the Build Notes Podcast! The week after that, I’ll be writing about another kind of differentiation, and how it’s holding us back from creating the world we deserve. Stay warm and sunny in the meantime, friends.
Yours in senioritis, Michael
Build Notes is a publication of Leaders in Practice LLC, PO Box 241, Glenside, PA 19038. Build Notes is Pennsylvania born and made.