Part 4: “Toward a Geography of Trust”

Originally I set out to write a blog about leaving my job as a high school instructor. I was going to focus on my personal experience and heartbreak, but as I began to write, I found that there were issues much larger than myself at stake in the field of education. My experience was indicative of large changes that have been taking place in the landscape of schools in general.

I use that word “landscape” intentionally because when we try to describe some of the more abstract concepts about the atmosphere and environments in which teaching, learning, and administrating, even parenting, we tend to deploy a register of words that make abstract concepts such as trust much more concrete and visible. Hillary Clinton, for example, popularized the vision of a village as the ideal setting for raising a child, others speak of building bridges between parents and teacher, teachers and students, and between administrators and teachers, and, more recently, classrooms as “safe spaces” with clear boundaries. We are often tossing words around such as “places” or “spaces” without really examining what we mean by them. 

This particular  blog aims to look at a specific set of these terms, a set that is centered around the concept of “place.” This set of terms is set off as distinct from another set of terms and beliefs that find their center around “space.” Some of the shifts in trust that I encountered over the last two decades (from relational trust to contractual trust) find a parallel in a shift from seeing the school as a place to the view that a school is a set of distinct, boundaried spaces. 

To understand and develop the concept of place (as opposed to space) I examined Hillary Clinton’s sensational 1996 book, It Takes a Village. Clinton took an African proverb and brought it into mainstream use in the United States. While she wrote about the original intention behind the proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” others quickly took the phrase and applied it to various situations and scenarios much like the “Got milk?” advertising campaign. Clinton writes: “This small book with the bright whimsical jacket provided endless opportunities for headline writers, who have come up with such variations as ‘It takes a village to have a parade!,’ ‘It takes a village to build a zero waste community,’ and [her] all time favorite, ‘It takes a village to raise a pig.’” (Clinton XIII).

So, why did Clinton land on this proverb and on, specifically, the notion of a village as the necessary ingredient for the well being, the development, the health, and the education of children, which was part and parcel of her role as First Lady during her husband’s presidency? What was it specifically about “a village,” an archaic term in the context of American society, a term generally used to refer to societies in developing countries? Clinton answers these questions in the following way:

Children exist in the world as well as in the family. From the moment they are born, they depend on a host of other “grown-ups” – grandparents, neighbors, teachers, ministers, employers, political leaders, and untold others who touch their lives directly and indirectly. Adults police their streets, monitor the quality of their food, air, and water, produce the programs that appear on their televisions, run the businesses that employ their parents, and write the laws that protect them. Each of us plays a part in every child’s life: It takes a village to raise a child… I chose that old African proverb to title this book because it offers a timeless reminder that children will thrive only if their families thrive and if the whole of society cares enough to provide for them. (5)

The point here is that children need to be supported from multiple directions. Parents by themselves cannot possibly provide the kind of nurturing environment that a village can. Villages have an untold number of eyes constantly on the lookout for risks, hands that are ready to scoop up a crying child and bandage a scraped knee. Clinton’s conception of the village is a community that includes teachers, neighbors, ministers, police, and countless others who are united in that their number one priority is the safety and well being of the children. She writes of her own childhood:

In the neighborhood where I grew up, if a child fell from a tree or a fight broke out between kids, someone else’s parent was likely to run out of the nearest house to help. Partly this was because more mothers were at home during the day, and other relatives frequently lived nearby. People also welcomed their neighbors’ intervention, rather than seeing it as a criticism of their parenting. (123)

The word village might seem simple at first, emitting a whiff of nostalgia for a simpler, older time in a remote, forgotten corner of the country. This word denoting a community is therefore associated with a very specific relationship between time and place. In fact, time and place are fused and inseparable in the same way that thinking of a place immediately conjures a memory from the past. To illustrate her concept of the village she uses 1950s Park Ridge, Illinois. One of the more vivid scenes she creates is of the early mornings in her household when she got up before it was even light out to practice multiplication at the kitchen table with her father. We picture him in his business suit with a newspaper and a cup of coffee while she sits rigidly across from him with a pencil writing out multiples of five, six, seven… Without looking up from his paper he has placed his finger on an error she made. 

Such a scene is like a Norman Rockwell painting, complete with sepia hues suggestive of a black and white photograph. It is romantic. It is an irrecoverable moment laden with the conflation of the classroom with the breakfast table. She is sitting rigidly like she does at school and her father momentarily substitutes for the teacher. This swapping of roles and locations is at the heart of the place that is the village. In the earlier paragraph that I quoted, “someone else’s parents” would run from a house to scoop up an injured child or break up a fight, and neighbors were substitute parents. 

The community of Clinton’s childhood, her village, is defined by its setting. The members of the community are related through proximity to one another. The unchanging stability of these years in Park Ridge seemed outside of the sweep and irreversible march of progress, absent of suspicion or mistrust of the person living next to you. If someone was close, they were part of the village that was her childhood. 

Here it is useful to revisit the three kinds of trust that are differentiated by Bryk and Schneider (Blog 2): organic, relational, and contractual. Bryk and Schneider argued that schools should be founded upon relational trust between teachers and students, between administrators and teachers, and between teachers and parents for effective improvement to take place. They argued that the other kinds of trust, namely organic and contractual, did not apply to schools because of the intimacy in the relationships especially between teachers and students. This distinction seems especially relevant when distinguishing between relational and contractual trust, but I argued that over the past decade I have noticed a shift from relational to contractual trust as the basis for the community that was the small independent school where I taught. Here, I want to highlight the kind of trust that has not been discussed, organic trust, and point out that it would appear that Hillary Clinton may be describing this very aspect of trust as the foundation upon which “the village” is built. Bryk and Schneider write:

Organic trust is predicated on the more or less unquestioning beliefs of individuals in the moral authority of a particular social institution, and characterizes closed, small-scale communities. In such social systems, individuals give their trust unconditionally; they believe in the rightness of the system, the moral character of its leadership, and all others who commit to the community. The presence of organic trust creates strong social bonds among members, who share an ethical responsibility for the consequences of their behaviors to themselves and others. Day to day social exchanges provide members with a broad range of personal rewards. A strong sense of identity with the institution is fostered, and members believe that they enact in their daily lives a core set of beliefs that have moral value. (Bryk and Schneider 16)

I actually believe that the small independent school where I taught for twenty-four years had elements of organic trust as well as relational trust. We had a strong set of shared beliefs centering around our mission statement, which was touted on a daily basis by the head and assistant head. The name of our school was Sonoma Academy, which was abbreviated as “SA,” and we commonly would say of certain behaviors or statements, “that’s so SA!” or “that’s not SA,” in keeping with the notion that there was a core set of beliefs we all shared that had moral value. Our school was, at times, a closed, small-scale community, and our weekly meetings did, at times, follow a pattern religiously, beginning with a moment of reflection, then a senior speech, then music by students, some kind of slideshow, and always ending with a moment of gratitude and announcements. On the positive side, this organic trust ensured a feeling of ease, comfort, and safety that bolstered and supported the relational trust that was developed between teachers and students in the classroom, and between the administration and parents at the regular school events that were created for the purpose of fostering the community. 

The organic trust deepened the rich relationships we had with each other and with students because it involved a curiosity for the land on which the school was located. The history and ecology of the land was not only part of the curriculum (geography-based humanities programs, biology labs involving the nearby creek, regular, meditative walks around the campus) but also part of the ritual of our school through land acknowledgments, school ceremonies, and guest speakers who had histories with the land. I played the part of John Taylor, a nineteenth century rancher who once owned the land, and a teacher dressed as this character was often present at community meetings, convocations, and school anniversary celebrations. His character was comic and larger than life, but the messages he brought were always rooted in history, gathering the past into a nostalgic moment in which we all belonged to the place where the school was located. Our messages of caring and nurturing the students made us as familiar to one another as Hillary Clinton’s villagers were and, in the face of John Taylor, we all became  like children asking their parents about what it was like when they were young (in this case when they were alive!). In this sense our school, SA, became like Hillary’s village. We used the name of our school as a metonym in the same way that Clinton does. When Clinton was advocating for programs to help parents become teachers, rather than stating that these programs were the result of legislation, she credits “the village,” characterizing place with the values and agency that actually belonged to educators and state representatives:

Some parents do not easily assume the role of teacher. They may lack the confidence, be unwilling to devote the time, or simply not know, for example, that reading aloud to babies and toddlers is the single most important activity we can do with children to ensure that they will read well in school. But the village has found ways to help parents start teaching children when it counts most, in the preschool years. (228-229)

The village becomes an abiding, but evolving presence in the hands of Clinton:

It’s important that we equip our children with solid, sensitive models of what men and women can be, both as caregivers and as achievers, because when they go out into the world, they’ll discover what men and women who try to put children first already know: the village has a long way to go to accommodate their diverse and changing roles both in the working world and at home. (205)

Just as the village gives and evolves, it can also experience loss:

When [children’s other talents are ignored because they underperform in math or reading], teachers, parents, and other adults often write them off as “slow” or “unmotivated” and come to expect less of them in the way of academic performance. Tragically, the children are thus deprived of the opportunity to master the basic skills they will need to realize their particular gifts. This is a loss not only to them but to the entire village, which could benefit from all our talents. (224)

But on the whole, the village becomes a metonymy for willing care and support from other trusted adults:

Even in the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any one of us to raise children alone. And when single parents try, they have to perform roles outside their usual repertoire, or get others to take on those roles. Even families with two parents rely on the village for functions that are beyond their scope. (190)

In both places, Sonoma Academy and Clinton’s village, trust is inspired by virtue of belonging to a place. The boundaries are vague, at times filling one’s consciousness as if there is no elsewhere, and at others, distinctly setting off itself from what is an elsewhere inhabited by others. In both cases, my school and Clinton’s village, privilege plays a definitive role. It was constantly pointed out that our school was a bubble of privilege within the economically and racially diverse society that is Sonoma County. The tuition came with an enormous price tag, and no matter how much we emphasized our scholarship and financial aid programs, it was often all everyone saw of the school. And our school’s belief in service programs was reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s recollections about her own village when she described some of the activities she embarked upon with her church. She recalled babysitting in a migrant-labor camp in Chicago with her church group as a formative experience in which a positive sense of herself emerged through the development and nurturing of a sense of responsibility and respect for others. Inherent in the scenario is the asymmetry in social status between the church group and the migrant labor camp. Clinton does mention that some of the mothers were wary about letting teenage white children take care of their brown babies, but the privilege inherent in this dynamic is characterized as an opportunity for the development and enrichment of the children in the church group. It is they who are affirming themselves, gaining confidence, and grounding themselves as moral individuals, and it is not entirely clear what the migrant families are gaining other than possibly a temporary reprieve from child care. In discovering means with which to give purpose to their efforts at becoming educated, artistic, athletic, and healthy, they have found something beyond themselves and social responsibility is born. 

Clinton is ultimately describing a rehearsal of trust (organic and relational) in which the discomfort and awkwardness of the asymmetric power relationship is alleviated through the excess of care by the privileged party toward the other. The aim is to make the other feel safe and comfortable, while the empowered party feels gratified and content in their posture of caring and helping. In the previous blog, I discussed how a deficit perspective results in distrust, and the application here seems quite relevant. If the migrant families felt that the children from the church organization didn’t think they were taking adequate care of their own children, such an event would be met with a great deal of distrust. In Clinton’s village, as with so many service programs in schools and communities, the true beneficiaries were the privileged children who have benefited from their encounter with the brown families by gaining new, more sophisticated and globally adept conceptions of themselves as not only moral but also altruistic. Clinton’s mother fostered such a posture of caring in Clinton and her siblings and friends asserting that it was not only an opportunity but a privilege to help others through drives for needy people. Her mother attempted to make helping others fun and exciting  so that it would appeal more to Clinton and her friends. One year, Clinton states, her mother recreated the Olympic games for the neighborhood kids so they could raise money for the United Way (182). Finding and serving something beyond oneself seems to be at the core of what Clinton’s parents and the adults in her life valued and wanted to pass down to her. It is at the core of what Clinton aims to inspire in her own daughter, and, in turn, in the society she and her husband envision for the country, which she (re)imagines as a village. I say re-imagines because the nation’s dream to better oneself is recast as bettering oneself by serving or caring for others, thus realigning the national interests with each individual’s personal interest.

The very basis for Clinton’s book, trying to recreate a village, may be, self-admittedly, skirting with privilege when conjuring the nostalgic notion of a tightly knit community who all care for one another. It is easier to conceive of a village nowadays as excluding others, as separating oneself from crime and poverty, and avoiding racism by controlling the membership within the community. Thus gated communities and elite private schools might come to mind before any kind of place that is founded on organic (and relational) trust. Clinton acknowledges this at the outset of her book:

Those who urge a return to the values of the 1950s are yearning for the kind of family and neighborhood I grew up in and for the feeling of togetherness they engendered. The nostalgia merchants sell an appealing Norman Rockwell-like picture of American life half a century ago, one in which every household was made up of stable parents, two kids, a dog, and a cat who all lived in a house with a manicured lawn and station wagon in the driveway. Life seemed simpler then, and our common values clearer. 

I understand that nostalgia. I feel it myself when the world seems too much to take. There were many good things about our way of life back then. But in reality, our past was not so picture-perfect. Ask African-American children who grew up in a segregated society, or immigrants who struggled to survive in sweatshops and tenements, or women whose life choices were circumscribed and whose work was underpaid. Ask those who grew up in the picture-perfect houses about the secrets and desperation they sometimes concealed. 

The longing we feel for “the way things used to be” obscures not only the reality of earlier times but the larger settings in which the family finds itself today, as it struggles with the effects of broken homes, discrimination, economic downturns, urbanization, consumerism, and technology. (20-21)

Members of Clinton’s childhood village shared the acknowledgement of children as their first allegiance, which, for Clinton, translates to supporting the families of those children. However, a large part of her book pinpoints the family unit as the very site where the problem lies. She writes:

The instability of American households poses great risks to the healthy development of children. The divorce rate has been falling slowly, but for a high proportion of marriages, “till death do us part” means “until the going gets tough.” And there has bee an explosion in the number of children born out of wedlock, from one in twenty in 1960 to one in four today. 

More than anyone else, children bear the brunt of such massive social transitions. The confusion and turmoil that divorce and out-of-wedlock births cause in children’s lives is well documented. The results of the National Survey of Children, which followed the lives of a group of seven to eleven-year-olds for more than a decade, and other recent studies demonstrate convincingly that while many adults claim to have benefited from divorce and single parenthood, most children have not. 

Children living with one parent or in stepfamilies are two to three times as likely to have emotional and behavioral problems as children living in two-parent families. Children of single-parent families are more likely to drop out of high school, become pregnant as teenagers, abuse drugs, behave violently, become entangled with the law. A parent’s remarriage often does not seem to better the odds. (30-31)

The family is also the site that can make or break a child’s education, according to Clinton:

Betty Hart and Todd Risley, two researchers who have dedicated their lives to learning how kids learn, have much to tell us about the importance of talking to children. In their book, Meaningful Differences, they tell how they recruited forty-two couples of varying socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, who allowed their babies’ everyday interactions to be recorded one hour per month over the course of the two and a half years. 

While the families differed in income and educational background, all were stable and functioned well. The poorer parents and less educated parents were just as devoted to their children as more affluent parents, the researchers found. Yet they interacted with their children less, and the families as a whole were more isolated. For example, they did not venture out to places like the zoo or museums as frequently. 

The biggest difference among the various households, though, was in the sheer amount of talking that occurred. The more money and education parents had, the more they talked to their children, and the more effectively from the point of view of vocabulary development. At the rate they were going, by age three, the children of the best-educated, most affluent parents would have heard more than thirty million words. Three times as many as the children in the least-privileged families. 

There were also significant differences in the ways parents talked to their children. On average, the parents with the most income and education tended to speak more affirmatively, conveying frequent and explicit approval with statements like “That’s good,” “That’s right,” “I love you.” Working-class parents generally praised their children, but less frequently, and they more often voiced statements of disapproval, such as “That’s bad,” “You’re wrong,” “Stop,” “Quit,” “Shut up.” Poor parents praised their children even less often and criticized them more frequently. (87-88)

And, of course, that was not all Clinton associated with the family unit. She cited examples of unsupervised  television, drug use, gang violence, and physical and sexual abuse within families as being prevalent debilitating barriers to child development. The very site Clinton hangs her concept of the village upon is the reason for its failure in today’s world. 

Clinton’s lens is one of a deficit perspective, which we discussed in the third blog in this series. Like solutions to problems in public schools, Clinton describes a menu of national programs aimed at improving families (and schools). She refers to these national programs as the modern village, and encourages the reader to receive them with the same familiarity they would a friendly neighbor, teacher, or minister. Clinton describes a situation when her husband was governor of Arkansas that was quite reminiscent of the case studies discussed in Schultz’s book, Distrust and Educational Change:

When I worked on education reform in Arkansas, the proposals we made for a standardized curriculum and course content recommendations to accompany it encountered opposition from administrators who claimed in all sincerity that their students didn’t want or need higher standards. One superintendent told me that very few of “his kids” went to college, so he couldn’t see what difference it would make. Another superintendent ushered me into his office and pointed at a sign on his desk that said, “This too shall pass.” He told me that was what he thought of my husband’s efforts to reform education. Standing in front of the new gymnasium they had built, he and the school board solemnly assured me that they knew the kids in their district, and none of them were interested in taking foreign languages, art, or advanced sciences. (240)

This might have been a paragraph right out of Schultz’s descriptions of Oakland, Chester, and Chicago while she was in charge of similar reforms before she became aware of the strong distrust and defensive posture the improvement programs and reforms invoke within communities where there is the pervasive feeling that those behind the program do not know or understand the needs of their community thus stripping them of their dignity. Yet Clinton goes on to tout the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, as well as various programs aimed at empowering families to transform their homes into pre-kindergarten classrooms. HIPPY, or Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters, in Arkansas, and PAT, or Parents as Teachers, in Missouri are two examples. 

As we near the end of the discussion of Hillary Clinton’s popular concept of the village as the trusted place in which to raise children, it is useful to take stock of some of the observations we have made. We have benefited from the writings of Bryk and Schneider as well as Schultz as a context within which to read Clinton. Bringing Bryk and Schneider’s three kinds of trust and Schultz’s concept of the deficit perspective (distrust) has not only illuminated Clinton, but also nuanced these very concepts we used as our lenses. 

We realized during our reading of Clinton that she was describing the village as a place from which organic trust flows. By virtue of residing in her village conveys a set of strong values and core beliefs that center around the welfare of children, including children that are not just you own. The local orientation of organic trust can be expressed in the following diagram in which place actually mediates trust between individuals. The relationship that is featured in the diagram is between teachers and students, but it can be applied to parents, administrators, and other community members as well. 

Organic Trust:

Teacher —------- (Place) —------- Student

This stands in contradistinction from relational trust, which we discussed in Blog 2. In relational trust it is the belief that the intention of another individual is coming from a position of caring and concern that inspires inspirational trust. 

Relational Trust:

Teacher —------- (Intention) —------- Student

And finally, also discussed in the second blog, was the concept of contractual trust, which is governed by protocol and codes, and guaranteed by policies that will hold the provider accountable (economically or legally).

Contractual Trust:

Teacher —------- (Protocol) —------- Student

We have also seen hints of blending kinds of trust. In the case of my independent school, I believe that prior to recent changes, both organic and relational trust were informing the relationships between teachers and students, teachers and parents, and administrators and teachers. The expression “That’s so SA!” was a constant acknowledgment of our school as a metonym for the deep sense of compassion, empathy, and imagination that we shared while teachers and administrators were constantly expressing and acting upon a deep sense of caring that exceeded the traditional expectations from our roles as teachers and administrators. I realize that this is just as romantic as Clinton’s nostalgic reminiscences of her childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois, but even if you take into account the romanticizing, you will still find a large dose of these qualities present. And this became all too apparent when it began to disappear. 

For Clinton, the village expanded from individual neighbors living in proximity to her to national programs that compensate for the break up of families, the increasing complexity of social media, the appeal of drugs and alcohol – the basic problems that are part and parcel of modernization, urbanization, and progress. Ultimately, while attempting to characterize the very programs that were part of her husband’s and her political agenda as friendly faces to be trusted like neighbors in a village, Clinton has made the same shift away from organic (and relational) trust to contractual trust. She brings to bear the same deficit lens that Schultz has written about, and she uses poor performances on national testing as the justification for these programs. 

The admittedly romantic vision of my former school community as being based on organic and relational trust also suggests that these forms of trust, in their capacity to co-exist, might be on a spectrum. On one end is the small, tightly knit community or village where organic trust exists by virtue of belonging to a particular place, where it is assumed that everyone shares a set of unquestioned values and will act according to these values. The individuals in these communities inherit the values and play limited roles in recreating them. The assumption is that these values and beliefs abide permanently in the land and buildings themselves. On the other end is contractual trust where the intentions of individuals are explicitly dictated by protocols and codes. These codes and protocols are prominently displayed in various spaces such as the classroom or conference room, and they are regularly reviewed and invoked prior to lessons and meetings. The classroom and conference room become dedicated, temporary spaces. The intentionality that is central to relational trust between individuals becomes redirected into the spaces the individuals share with one another, and these spaces are as distinctly boundaried as the roles of the individuals who share them. Thus the shift we have been observing originally from relational trust to contractual trust may also be seen as moving along a continuum away from schools as places with a set of shared, unquestioned, and often unstated values toward schools as a set of intentionally designed spaces, with explicit codes and protocols that are regularly revisited and reviewed. 

There are two trends along two different but parallel spectrums:

Organic Trust —-------Relational Trust—----- Contractual Trust

Place —------------------------------------—-------- Space

For Clinton the cause in this trend is simply the double edged sword of progress. With technological and economic advancement and globalization, there are benefits but there are also tolls on the small, tightly knit communities she finds necessary for the development of children. In the next blog, I plan to examine some of the factors causing the steady drift along the spectrum away from organic trust to contractual trust, away from schools as places to schools as spaces. Undoubtedly the uptick in cyberbullying and the social isolation during the Covid pandemic have played a large role. 

Clinton’s book has been a good introduction to the association between place and organic trust, and as we continue to deepen our understanding of these I also hope to begin to characterize and analyze the relationship between contractual trust and space. Eventually we will be examining the construct of “safe spaces” as the new model for school communities.