“Participate in public institutions and support making them pleasant and workable”
For some people who are just kind of normie Democrats, that means give your neighborhood public elementary school a try as a first resort. I’m not asking anyone to sacrifice their kid’s welfare for the sake of the collective good. But is a year or two in a school that didn’t ultimately work out really that bad? Educated, affluent parents opting out of public education has, in fact, killed a lot of potentially functional school communities. Public schools only work if people with financial and social capital participate. If you’re the kind of person who would tell a pollster that you strongly support public education, you should try to actually support it by enrolling your kids and attending P.T.A. meetings and pitching in. You might find, as Kate and I did, that you really like your neighborhood school and its community and that it can be rewarding, both for you and your child, to meet people from different walks of life who you might not otherwise get to know.
And on the flip side, I know plenty of people in D.C. who happily send their kids to charter schools (which have incredibly high market share in our very charter-friendly city) but then, in their day jobs working in politics, they have nothing to say about the national Democratic Party walking away from charters entirely. I find that kind of weird. There isn’t one objectively correct way to live life or think about the world, and a little hypocrisy around the margin isn’t the worst possible outcome. But I think it would be broadly beneficial if more people made more of an effort to develop some coherence between their stated political values and their actual lives.
