Fellows Forward: Never Too Cool for School
Welcome to this month's Fellows Forward newsletter, from Emerson Collective. As always, if you'd like to receive this in your inbox, subscribe here .
When I was a kid, I loved Back to School Night. I grew up in Northern California, so the weather was, without fail, magnificent. Each one of the six (!!) K-12 schools I attended was a sprawling suburban campus with open-air walkways and grassy yards, wonderful places to traipse around under a sinking late-summer sun, maybe catch a few extra minutes with a best friend or a crush who was there.?
But what I liked most about those nights was the gathering of students, parents, and teachers in one place, outside of the hours of the school day. It made me feel like school was more than just a machine to distribute units of knowledge. With all of us there together, it felt like maybe school was a place where fillips of imagination and youthful curiosity could enliven what seemed a cold adult world of jobs and bills and responsibilities. On those warm evenings, the membrane between school and real life seemed to be at its thinnest.
Today’s newsletter is a crash course in what school can, or ought to, be. On the syllabus: history teacher Chuck Yarborough and bookseller Emily Liner, one of his former students; advocate Jonathan Klein; and architect Michael Murphy. Each offers a perspective that is conspicuous in its avoidance of essays and homework and capital-E “education.”
By the way! Going Varsity in Mariachi , the film about Abel Acu?a’s high school mariachi ensemble, is out on Netflix TODAY, and it’s a great companion piece to the newsletter. Ok—cram your stuff into a locker (do they still have those?), find a spot on the quad, and read on.
History and Literature: How Schools Can be Catalysts of Cultural Life?
Last October, I went down to Columbus, Mississippi, to visit with Chuck Yarborough, a high school history teacher. I was there to witness the unveiling of a new historical marker , researched and written by Chuck’s students, that honors the women who desegregated the Mississippi University of Women, known as The W. (Chuck’s high school, the statewide boarding school Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, or MSMS, is housed on The W’s campus.)?
After witnessing the ceremony, I was fortunate enough to stay in town for another day. I met the mayor, the librarian, elected officials, students, and teachers—and also a local bookstore owner, Emily Liner, who runs Friendly City Books and happens to be one of Chuck’s former students. What was clear was that Columbus, as a community, possesses an incredible life of the mind, and The W and MSMS seemed to be a big part of it. So when I got to thinking about Back to School, I called up Chuck and Emily to chat about the role of schools in building community.?
When school is in session, college kids are coming back, and younger kids are getting in the mode for school, what does Columbus feel like?
Chuck Yarborough: There's a summer doldrums here, and that’s probably true of every community that has a small or large college. So there's this period in the summer when there's a relief that the school year has ended—but also a sense of loss because the school year has ended, and all of the cultural community that has developed over the course of the school year dissipates. But we're kind of like a cultural cicada. This is our time. We make noise for nine months and then it goes away to start again.?
Emily Liner: In the last couple of years, our local schools are trying to move closer to a year-round model. They started July 27, which is crazy to me. As they've changed the school year, they've also incorporated two-week breaks in the spring and the fall, with one week being a true vacation and the other week being what they call intersession. It's supposed to offer more interactive and interdisciplinary and exploratory programs. I'm really hoping that there is a world in which the bookstore’s community can get involved in those. What I love about working with MSMS is that MSMS really embraces opportunities to get off campus, to bring in different partners, to expose students to different intellectual opportunities, different career opportunities.
Chuck, when Emily opened Friendly City Books [in 2020], was that like a new tool for you as a teacher??
CY: Oh, absolutely. I remember telling students, there's a new bookstore about to open, and the owner was a Tales From the Crypt performer [one of Chuck’s signature local history projects].
EL: I sure was.
CY: My basic principle in a classroom is to try and help students understand that the first world they can shape is the world they can reach out and touch. And in the 21st century, I think it's particularly difficult for people to see things across the street. When a bookstore comes along, I'm absolutely going to celebrate that, get students to go. But also... that's the end destination. It's about a mile walk from our dormitories to Friendly City Books, and there are about three approved routes for our students to walk. Every one of them takes them past something different to observe. So yes, when the bookstore opened, it was an event in my classroom as a sales pitch, go to the bookstore, be intellectually engaged. But I also was thinking about: the journey on the way there is part of the lesson, too.
There's three approved routes students can walk? What do you mean?
CY: Well, they can't go certain routes through town. They're not supposed to. Mostly so we can keep track of them.
EL:? Twenty years ago, when I was at MSMS, you had to earn privileges to drive, and so when you first got there as a junior, you could only use your car to go home on the weekends. So for the first nine weeks or so, the only places you could go were either places you could walk or places where you could take a school bus. There was a Books-A-Million here when I was a student. It closed during Covid. That was always a popular hangout, but it was just a store in the mall. It didn't have the community programming that we do, or the specialty in books, like the way we specialize in Mississippi writers.
CY: It's become popular to talk about things like food deserts. There are educational deserts. And a bookstore in a small town ends up being a way to facilitate combating the educational desert because while schools are kind of an oasis of education they're limited in their impact and outreach. To have a local bookstore like Emily’s is just another way to carry the water, so to speak. It was clear from the community enthusiasm about the bookstore opening—across the community, not just among the college professors and teachers like me—that we were starved for that.?
So give me an example of those pieces really coming together.
EL: We do author events regularly throughout the year. One thing that we've been able to do is give away free books. We have a policy where we give away a free copy of the book to any student who comes. It could be our K-12 students, public school students, or private school students. We always know that MSMS students are going to be enthusiastic about attending.
CY: Well, and the bookstore is the nexus, in some ways, between the university and MSMS and the rest of the community. Every year that I’ve lived here, there's been a common read at the university [where every student is encouraged to read the same book]. It was really after Emily got here that university officials started to say, hey, maybe we should involve everybody and stop calling it the common read, but call it the community read and involve the whole town. And that was because of Emily's vision, I think. It brought MSMS into the fold, and the city of Columbus is now a co-sponsor. ?
More: Chuck and Emily highly recommend Columbus’ last two community reads, First Gen by Alejandra Campoverdi and How the Word is Passed by (EC Fellow!) Clint Smith.
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Science and Math: When School Buildings are Climate Leaders
For some kids, “back to school” is a misnomer. Yes, school is technically back in session. No, they are not, exactly, in school. The reason? Extreme heat is closing classrooms. It’s a reminder, says Jonathan Klein, that climate change is a major disruptor of the education system. (In fact, there’s a well established body of research showing that hot classrooms lead to worse educational outcomes.) Jonathan, who leads UndauntedK12 , a nonprofit that helps schools decarbonize, is interested in how extreme weather is impacting Back to School, and believes that schools—like, the actual buildings—can not just mitigate climate change, but be an absolutely crucial part of the solution.?
It’s simple math. There are about 100,000 public K-12 schools spread across the U.S. They represent the second-largest form of public infrastructure in the country after roads and highways, and they are one of the biggest users of energy. They generate as much carbon emissions each year, 42 million metric tons, as the output of all the cars in Georgia, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Many are aging and need to upgrade their facilities, anyway.
That’s why, in the two years since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, Undaunted has been helping schools take advantage of the funding it offers for purchasing clean energy equipment —funding that requires no competitive process to earn, has no cap, and is paid out in cash. Just this month, Undaunted unveiled a database of schools across the country that have received IRA funding for installations of energy storage systems, ground-source heat pumps, and solar. It’s a nifty bit of data visualization and a great advocacy tool. But when you get down to it, what it really means is that kids at some 100 facilities spread across roughly half of U.S. states get to go back to school in buildings that are more sustainable and better for their health and learning. We already know that what happens in school buildings is crucial to our future. It’s kind of poetic to know that the buildings themselves are, too. ?
Elective: Lessons for Pivoting into Climate Work
Jonathan was a member of our “Climate Pivoter” cohort of EC Fellows —individuals who made a pivot in their careers to start using their skills and talents to address climate change. He also happens to have one of the most refreshing and inspiring perspectives I’ve heard on doing climate work: Instead of viewing it as some kind of curse that we’re living through one of humanity’s biggest crises, he says, we should “be inspired by the opportunity that we have to contribute. That we are born in this moment, in these times, and that this is our watch.”?
Jonathan recently shared with me some of the lessons he’s learned while “pivoting” into the climate space. It’d be a real betrayal of the spirit of this newsletter if I failed to pass them on.
Home Room: Spaces that Shape How We See the World
Architect Michael Murphy is working on a book tentatively titled Your Life in Ten Buildings, and he himself has been involved in the design of a few schools, including the gorgeous campus of African Leadership University . So I’m not surprised he had something provocative to say when I asked him what makes a good school. “It’s not just ‘a room where teaching happens’—that’s not what a school is,” he told me. “In fact, one might imagine ‘a room where teaching happens’ as an absence of a philosophy of education.” The best schools, he explained, are physical manifestations of very specific ideas about cultivating the life of the mind. A well-designed school can shape how we learn. It can also tell us something about the value we place in learning, which is to say, about how we see the world. Here are some of Michael’s favorites.
For Rudolf Steiner, the somewhat controversial figure who established Waldorf education, “every moment in the school environment must be one of inspiration, and delight, and curiosity,” Michael said. Steiner literally designed both the pedagogy and the buildings for his new education system. He resisted square corners and predictable shapes. His masterpiece, the Goetheanum, in Switzerland, made novel use of concrete to achieve effects not possible with wood.
Encounters with tuberculosis and the Spanish Flu pandemic led some educators in the pre-war period to conclude that one of a school’s jobs was to keep students healthy. A classic of the so-called “open-air education” movement is the Openluchtschool voor het gezonde kind (literally, “Open air school for the healthy child)” in Amsterdam, designed by Dutch architect Johannes Duiker. Ironically, a few decades later, some architects moved toward windowless rooms, to eliminate distractions. “There’s actually a lot of evidence of how bad it was for kid’s learning,” Michael says.?
Sometimes the aperture for responding to societal conditions can open even wider. Architect Anna Heringer’s Handmade School in Bangladesh includes novel features for students, like what Michael calls “womb-like spaces” where they can take refuge from the classroom. But its very construction, using low-cost, readily available materials like earth and bamboo, served a purpose for its community: the builders trained local laborers in the building techniques, so they could go and make new, better buildings where they lived. Which takes us back to what Chuck and Emily had to say: at their very best, schools are for all of us. ?
More: If you’ll be in Chicago, Michael helped design an art installation, Towards , that opened in Chicago with the DNC and runs through September 15.
Since we’ve all now got design on the brain, before we go I want to share an interview with one of Jonathan’s fellow Pivoters, landscape architect Sara Zewde . She recently talked to Monocle about her practice, which synthesizes ideas about beauty, history, culture, and ecology into traversable, physical form. I’m no expert—please don’t even ask me to pronounce this—but in a way her thoughts reminded me of a concept Michael mentioned, Gesamtkunstwerk , German for “total work of art.” It’s the notion that an artwork or design should fuse several art forms into one cohesive whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. There’s an analogue for learning, I think: It is being open to science and history and art and emotion and space and form, all of it, that produces the bold new ideas that propel us ahead.
Forward!