We’re losing our sense of “we” in an iSociety

A few years back, a professor I know asked her Civics 101 students what “public” meant to them. Their answers are telling. To them, public meant poor people. Public housing, public assistance, public schools.

I thought of that as I read the latest salvo against our public schools, in this case the offers by private profiteers of a “choice” to dodge the public schools and flee to the safety of online courses–as chronicled in Lee Fang’s article for The Nation, and Stephanie Saul in the New York Times. It’s just the latest–but perhaps the most damaging– in a long line of retreat from public goods and into the arms of a world tailored to our unique selves.

This steady disappearance of the public systems we take part in daily is for many a sign of progress. But in this headlong race to privatize everything–and its cousin, tailoring everything to our circumstances, we risk losing the very fabric that stitches us together in a society. We risk losing the “public” spaces; the “we” in a rush for the “me.”

The daily interactions in public spaces, whether on a public bus, at the park, on our sidewalks and highways, in a classroom, at the doctor’s office, or at the DMV, are shared experiences, and ultimately meritocratic. Even Bill Gates has to renew his driver’s license. Our interactions remind us what we have in common with others–sometimes others we would not otherwise meet. The rules (wait your turn in line) and customs (say thank you to the bus driver) reflect back on us the order of our ideal society.

Public education is one of the most prominent of these public goods. It is in school that we learn to be part of a society, to share, to exchange, to take turns. It is where we forcibly shed the individual myopia and ego, where we first realize that there are better soccer players or spellers than us, or that not everyone is waiting with bated breath to hear our answer. It is where we realize that some kids have it harder than others.  We learn our ABCs and 123s, of course, but it is the physical togetherness and a shared experience that binds us. It is these shared experiences that make us feel so bound to our “Class of 1992″ or that makes us cheer wildly for our football team. It is this communal glue that provides us with an identity beyond ourselves.

When we whittle away at this public-ness, we run into trouble. When we carve ourselves off from public spaces via experiences tailored to our preferences and income level, it will nudge us ever closer to little islands of privacy–and disconnect us from the larger good. We will buy our way into a “concierge” medical service so we don’t have to “suffer” through a waiting room. We will gate ourselves off in our “own” communities so we don’t have to live next door to someone who might opt for pink flamingos in the yard. Or we can skip the classroom altogether and learn what we want online. The latter has been in the news of late as private corporations rush to offer “choice” to school children and their families through online classrooms.

The latest push to give children a choice to learn online instead of in a classroom is couched in language that suggests they will be rescued from the grip of the public. “Kids have been shackled to their brick-and-mortar school down the block for too long,” Ronald Packard, CEO of K12, Inc., a private company offering online courses (for a fee), told the New York Times, adding that for the first time, every child, regardless of where he or she lives, has a choice. (One hears in that choice a choice to withdraw).

Beyond the question of whether a private company, with a bottom line to attend to, can truly educate all children (aka, the public), there is the question I’ve been clumsily trying to make and that Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land puts so much better: The “one-size-fits-all” public services, he says, might have had their faults, but “their provision was universal, for good and ill they were regarded as a public responsibility.”

There is no equivalent of a public bus or a public classroom online. In fact, the online communities are the exact opposite of public spaces. We self-select into the online worlds, balkanizing by interests, splintering down to the most specialized slices. You don’t have to ride with someone who is talking too loud, or who is softly weeping with her face to the window, or who is reading a book you never heard of. You might run across those ideas or people online, but you don’t have to sit with them for 30 minutes—time to wonder, to sympathize, and yes to fume. You click and you’re gone. Some will say that’s the exact reason they love the internet, or private taxis. They don’t have to be bothered. It is why we live in gated communities as well. In those havens, we don’t have to brush up against humanity if we don’t want to.

But the atomized “me” worlds that we retreat to are not community. They are not the building blocks to a society with a purpose and a sense of “we.”

If we can buy our way out of public spaces, or if we can tailor those “public” spaces to our own interests and prejudices, then what becomes of the larger purpose of building and sustaining a society? How do we convince people to sacrifice for a larger good? It gets harder, that’s for sure. Just look at the military. Without a national draft–a truly public experience– we have relegated the duty (yes, that old-fashioned word) to a smaller and smaller group doing endless tours of duty. Meanwhile the majority of us, untouched by it, don’t support– or protest– the wars. My 90+-year-old parents, who lived through WWII and its example after example of shared sacrifice, grow wistful at the memory. It was hard, but everybody was on the same footing. Everyone sacrificed. No one was able to buy a toaster. No one. And it was that sense of shared sacrifice that built a stronger society.

While libertarians likely cheer this “less public/more private” thinking, Judt reminds us that “the reduction of ‘society’ to a thin membrane of interaction between private individuals …was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Nazis.” And any society, wrote Edmund Burke, that destroys the fabric of its state, will soon be “disconnected into the dust and power of individuality.”

I fear that dismantling has been well underway for far too long. As the students in my friend’s class reveal, “public” is, in their minds, already “the other”—the “they” as Nietzsche put it. We have rushed headlong into a privatized, personally tailored world of a “we” and “they” — devoid of an “us.”