62 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC
That fi rst winter, the city’s school-bus drivers called a strike that lasted
many weeks. I took turns with a few other parents ferrying a group of kids
to and from school. Everyone who needed a ride would gather at the bus
stop at 7:30 each morning and we’d fi gure out which parent could drive that
day. Navigating the strike required a fl exible schedule and a car, and it put
immense pressure on families. A girl in our son’s class who lived in a housing
project a mile from the school suddenly stopped attending. Administrators
seemed to devote as much eff ort to rallying families behind the bus drivers’
union as to making sure every child could get to school. That was an early
sign of what would come later, of all that would eventually alienate me, and I
might have been troubled by it if I hadn’t been so taken with my new role as a
public-school father teaming up with other parents to get us through a crisis.
PARENTS HAVE ONE layer of skin too few. They’ve lost an
epidermis that could soften bruises and dull panic. In a divided city, in
a stratifi ed society, that missing skin—the intensity of every little worry
and breakthrough—is the shortest and maybe the only way to intimacy
between people who would otherwise never cross paths. Children become
a great leveler. Parents have in common the one subject that never ceases
to absorb them.
In kindergarten our son became friends with a boy in class I’ll call Marcus.
He had mirthful eyes, a faint smile, and an air of imperturbable calm—he
was at ease with everyone, never visibly agitated or angry. His parents were
working-class immigrants from the Caribbean. His father drove a sanita-
tion truck, and his mother was a nanny whose boss had been the one to sug-
gest entering Marcus in the school’s lottery—parents with connections and
resources knew about the school, while those without rarely did. Marcus’s
mother was a quietly demanding advocate for her son, and Marcus was
exactly the kind of kid for whom a good elementary school could mean the
chance of a lifetime. His family and ours were separated by race, class, and
the dozen city blocks that spell the diff erence between a neighbor hood with
tree-lined streets, regular garbage collection, and upscale cupcake shops,
and a neighborhood with aboveground power lines and occa sional shootings.
If not for the school, we would never have known Marcus’s family.
The boys’ friendship would endure throughout elementary school and
beyond. Once, when they were still in kindergarten, my wife was walking
with them in a neighborhood of townhouses near the school, and Marcus
suddenly exclaimed, “Can you imagine having a backyard?” We had a back-
yard. Our son kept quiet, whether out of embarrassment or an early intuition
that human connections require certain omissions. Marcus’s father would
drop him off at our house on weekends—often with the gift of a bottle of
excellent rum from his home island—or I would pick Marcus up at their
apartment building and drive the boys to a batting cage or the Bronx Zoo.
They almost always played at our house, seldom at Marcus’s, which was
much smaller. This arrangement was established from the start without
ever being discussed. If someone had mentioned it, we would have had to
confront the glaring inequality in the boys’ lives. I felt that the friendship
fl ourished in a kind of benign avoidance of this crucial fact.
At school our son fell in with a group of boys who had no inter est in join-
ing the lunchtime soccer games. Their freewheeling playground scrums
often led to good-natured insults, wrestling matches, outraged feelings, an
occasional punch, then reconciliation, until the next day. And they were the
image of diversity. Over the years, in addition to our son and Marcus, there
was another black boy, another white boy, a Latino boy, a mixed-race boy,
a boy whose Latino mother was a teacher’s aide at the school, and an Afri-
can boy with white lesbian parents. A teacher at the private school had once
called our son “anti-authoritarian,” and it was true:
He pursued friends who were mildly rebellious, irri-
tants to the teachers and lunch monitors they didn’t
like, and he avoided kids who always had their hand
up and displayed obvious signs of parental ambition.
The anxious meritocrat in me hadn’t completely
faded away, and I once tried to get our son to befriend
a 9-year-old who was reading Animal Farm, but he
brushed me off. He would do this his own way.
The school’s pedagogy emphasized learning
through doing. Reading instruction didn’t start until
the end of fi rst grade; in math, kids were taught vari-
ous strategies for multiplication and division, but the
times tables were their parents’ problem. Instead
of worksheets and tests, there were field trips to
the shoreline and the Noguchi sculpture museum.
“Project- based learning” had our son working for
weeks on a clay model of a Chinese nobleman’s tomb
tower during a unit on ancient China.
Even as we continued to volunteer, my wife and I
never stopped wondering if we had cheated our son
of a better education. We got antsy with the endless
craft projects, the utter indiff erence to spelling. But
our son learned well only when a subject interested
him. “I want to learn facts, not skills,” he told his fi rst-
grade teacher. The school’s approach—the year-long
second-grade unit on the geology and bridges of New
York—caught his imagination, while the mix of races
and classes gave him something even more precious:
an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than
anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and every-
one was his. In this way the school succeeded in its
highest purpose.
And then things began to change.
AROUND 2014, a new mood germinated
in America—at fi rst in a few places, among limited
numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapid-
ity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose
up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out
of disillusionment with the early promise of his
presidency— out of expectations raised and frus-
trated, especially among people under 30, which
is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new
mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short
years after the teachers at the private preschool had
crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds,
hope was gone.
At the heart of the new progressivism was indig-
nation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice
against groups of Americans who had always been
relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An
incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black
man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by
a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to
kneeling during the nation al anthem—would light a
