Takeaways:

– Education & freedom are at odds with the concept of schooling and social control. Right now we have a system that is primarily focused on sorting people into categories, rather than empowering them with the tools they need to succeed.

– Humans are preinstalled with curiosity– every child shows up to school excited. However, they lose their will to learn when they are punished. We need a focus on restorative justice, not a system that takes students out of class for wearing a hoodie. Students’ narratives flip once they are suspended and told that they are “bad kids” while being taken out of the classroom.

– The NYC public school system is inequitable. 70% of the students within it are students of color, however the schools’ faculty/administrations and the Department of Education staff do not reflect these numbers. We touched on other inequities as well, for example, sports teams in public schools. The city’s school with the most white students has 44 different sports teams, while schools with different racial makeups tend to have dramatically fewer. Schools that serve majority students of color are five times more likely to have applications for new sports teams denied.

– What can we do about all of this? We can Create, Disrupt, and Divest. A crucial thing to keep in mind is that when we decide to divest or disrupt, we need to decide what we are going to create and who we will consider while creating it. If you are going to burn a system down, you need something better to replace it with.

– A forward-thinking statement from our moderator, Chahney Hinds: “I want to have made things that make the world more beautiful– I’m not going to fix everything, but I can leave something that makes it easier for someone else to breathe.”