On School Breaks...

...and Taylorism.

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—

We murder to dissect.

-William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”

I was a teacher for sixteen years, and a K-12 student for twelve, and a college/ graduate student for a little over five. That’s about thirty-three years of life divided into two semester, four-quarter years; into winter and summer and spring breaks.

When I quit teaching two years ago, I entered a different world, one which, paradoxically, feels less built around work because work is just one of many daily occurrences. It is no longer the primary structure around the day and the month and the year.

I work at an independent bookstore a few days a week, I write almost every day, I do communications work almost every day, and I record music almost every day. There are no bells, there are no scheduled transitions.

I can eat lunch when I want.

I can go to the bathroom when I want.

To be fair, I also get to pay for my own health insurance, which would have been impossible before the passage of the Affordable Care Act (often called “Obamacare”), but which is still expensive.

And I make my own schedule most days, which can feel like both a gift and a significant obstacle to wellness. It’s easy to stay inside too much, to stay up too late.

Traditional educational schedules, like Amazon factories, are a powerful vestige of what excitable capitalists in the late 1800s liked to call “scientific management”. The granddaddy of this approach, Frederick Winslow Taylor, was a guy who never worked what most of us would call a “job” in his life, but who nonetheless had lots of passionate ideas about how to make work more efficient.

Taylor liked to time workers as they did things like shovel coal, in order to figure out the ideal rate of coal-shoveling.

In other words, he had a lot in common with many of the folks who still dominate the way we conceptualize the “modern” school and the “modern” workplace: a place where narrowly-defined outputs are everything, where quantifying “work” (usually, standardized tests and assignments) is the only way to describe what’s happening in the school, where, if you can’t figure out a way to quantify the work people are doing at home, you just make them stop working remotely. Everything has a number.

On the other hand, a schedule can be good. A formula or algorithm for completing a task can reduce the anxiety of making too many decisions. I found that many students liked having a timer or a clear deadline for a task (though I suspect for some this was merely an internalization of an arbitrary collective decision made by the adults around them).

And a predictable vacation can certainly be nice, a light at the end of the tunnel for a period of stressful work for some students and educators.

One of my favorite novels to teach was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s WE, which was arguably the first version of what modern audience think about when they imagine a sci-fi dystopia. (It was George Orwell’s acknowledged inspiration for 1984, for example.)

Zamyatin’s novel was ahead of its time in many ways, but maybe the most important is the way in which it understood that the 1900s and beyond would see an ever-intensifying obsession with finding ways to subdivide our time on Earth into smaller and smaller units.