Imagining Intuitive Policymaking
What could our communities look like if we listened more carefully to our bodies?
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Learning to Listen to My Body
I woke up Tuesday morning grumpy and groggy after a bad night’s sleep. The wind outside my window was howling. My plan had been to wake up by 8 am and start working by 9 am. But my body was telling me something different. I set an alarm to wake me up in time for a 10 am call and I went back to sleep.
It was self-indulgent, and something I never could have done as a classroom teacher. When I woke up at 9:45 I felt much better.
Over the past couple of years, through therapy, conversations with friends, podcasts, and reading, I have been learning to pay more attention to messages from my body. For most of my life, I have not listened attentively to my body. Instead I spent most of my energy making decisions in my head. I still believe that reasoning through decisions is valuable, but I know now that when I don’t check in with my body, I miss valuable information.
Our system of capitalism often encourages this style of thinking. It wants us to prioritize productivity above all else in our decisions. This is true for me as someone working from home and with substantial class privilege. It’s even more true for low wage workers and people who have historically been robbed of bodily autonomy (women, fat people, trans people, Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color). If all of us noticed the physical and emotional toll of the capitalist grind, we might be too sick, tired, or angry to be productive.
Intuitive vs. Rational Decision Making
It’s one thing to practice this as individuals. But systemic change requires collective action. I wonder what our communities and policies might look like if they were guided more by our collective intuition. What could we create if we listened more carefully to our bodies and trusted our guts?
Making decisions from our intuition is a simpler process. It is also crucial to taking care of ourselves . Do we need food, sleep, a walk outside? By listening to our own needs, we’re also better equipped to care about and care for others’ needs. It is easier to ignore others’ pain when you ignore your own.
Thinking things through rationally without listening to my body can overcomplicate decision making. For me, rational thinking is often the voice that tells us what I should be doing, overriding the voice telling me what I want to be doing. It also strikes me that rational and ration, as in to ration out resources, come from the same word. It feels like so much of our policies that entrench scarcity are the result of rational policy making that ignores human needs.
As a historical example, the 3/5 compromise, crafted during the Age of Reason comes to mind. This is a prime example of the danger of rationalism taken to its extreme. It is the result of thinking that is divorced from humanity. Did the framers of the Constitution really feel that this was a just decision? Regardless, they didn’t check in with the needs of the enslaved Black people who were affected.
By contrast intuitive policymaking would start from a simple question: What do people need to thrive? It would ask us to build up from this premise, rather than tinkering with our current systems. Rationalism tells us that we have to do what is realistic and within reach. It prioritizes stability and security for the majority at the expense of others. In this framework we continue tweaking and working within present systems to gradually expand access to housing, healthcare, voting rights… We rarely acknowledge that denying these rights to anyone is unjustifiable.
What could intuitive policy making offer to education?
We’re once again in a rancorous debate about whether or not to close schools. Currently rational policymaking is providing reasons to keep schools open such as: the majority of omicron cases are mild, kids generally don’t get very sick or transmit the virus, schools are not sites of spread, or the fact that families rely on schools for childcare. Generally, I think policymakers guided by these facts are also guided by a moral and human concern for young people. However, like most mainstream conversations about kids and communities of color, this one neglects the actual concerns of parents of color.
This approach ignores a few other factors:
The lived experience of people in schools (NYC teachers can tell you, they are not getting tested or contact traced! I’m very skeptical of whether we actually understand the role of schools in covid transmission).
The physical needs of people in schools.
The emotional needs of people in schools.
The risks to people on the margins.
Rational policymaking urges us to look at the “big picture.” In doing so, we lose sight of the harm to immunocompromised teachers and students, students with certain disabilities, and others.
Intuitive policy making would ask: What are the needs of all of the humans in our community? What do we need to provide to make sure these needs are met? What are the human costs of not meeting these needs?
If we’re trying to use information from our bodies to make decisions about schools, it’s worth noting how trauma affects our bodies. People who have experienced trauma sometimes filter new information through past experiences.
I still remember how I felt when I went back to school in September 2020. On the first day of school, we learned that our school’s ventilation system failed inspection. I felt panic. There was a tightness and anxiety throughout my body. As our school community discussed whether to work in the building that day, an ambulance siren could be heard nearby.
“This is what we’re going back to if we reopen!” a colleague yelled.
Thankfully, the return to school in September did not precipitate an immediate spike in covid cases. But some school workers, students, and their family members did get sick. Some got sick enough to be hospitalized or died. And many of us who never got sick still felt unsafe and terrified throughout the school year.
People who experience trauma may have different needs to feel safe and secure, but that doesn’t make these needs irrelevant. Intuitive policy making would start from a place of asking what those needs are and assuming they are valid.
The truth is, every teacher I know wants schools to remain open. We know that remote learning is academically and emotionally harmful. Beyond that, it’s in our self-interest. We don’t want to struggle. And remote learning was a tremendous struggle. Teachers are willing to assume some level of risk to avoid remote learning. What we ask for in return is the tools available to keep us as safe as possible.
What do teachers and students need?
It is infuriating to watch teachers and students fighting to have their needs met. It breaks my heart to see elected officials rationalizing keeping schools open, while denying schools adequate resources for testing, tracing, PPE, and staffing. In doing so, they are saying that the human needs of educators and young people are not worth the material costs to our economic system.
I would love to imagine what schools could look like if we used intuitive policy making. Beyond covid, there are a lot of implications for intuitive policy making at the school level from curriculum and assessment to recess and school lunches.
To be clear, I don’t think intuition and rationalism are at odds or completely separate. Perhaps we can think of intuitive policy making as the what and the why of education and other systems. Rational policy making clarifies the who, how, and when. The goal is to align our reasoning with our intuition to create caring communities and systems, rather than ones that ignore our bodies’ needs.
Let me know what you think in the comments. I’d also love questions or suggestions for future writing.
Other recent writing:
[Blog post] The Educator's Room - How to Quit Teaching in 2022
[Blog post] The Educator's Room - January 6th is Not Up for Debate
[Podcast] History Daily - January 12th, 1948 - Gandhi’s Last Fast
"It is easier to ignore others’ pain when you ignore your own." Thank you for this, Ruben! Schools and school systems rely on teachers' enduring and tolerating the daily harms inflicted on us so that we can be relied upon to perpetrate, overlook, or normalize the harms being perpetrated upon our students.
Thanks for reading Steve. And your comment is so helpful to me in making that connection. Did you read Carla Shalaby's "Troublemakers"?