Beware Belonging

Sounds great for your child, until you understand what it really means

In the rush to rebrand Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs as something less pernicious, many organizations have modified their DEI programs as Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEI&B), or some variation on the theme. The addition of belonging as a fourth aspirational value or concept is intended to neutralize whatever hesitations or dissent people feel towards DEI by itself.

Belonging began to enter the social justice lexicon about 2017 through the workplace -- as a means to improve employee engagement, retention and performance in businesses that had already adopted DEI programs. Perhaps most influential was a 2019 study published in the  Harvard Business Review entitled “The Value of Belonging at Work.” The authors found that, “high belonging was linked to a whopping 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days.”

What works in the workplace is not always transferrable, nor desirable to transfer, to the schoolhouse. Belonging was introduced into schools with a distinctly different purpose, and it is crucial to recognize that it has a unique impact on students in the educational environment. Adults who hear about belonging at work are able to compartmentalize their feelings at work. Adult employees can leave if they don’t like the corporate culture. Children in schools cannot. The power imbalance in schools between adult figures of authority who must be obeyed vastly eclipses the workplace dynamic where employees have rights and the power to walk.

In spite of the obvious risks, consultants and administrators plunge full-speed ahead incorporating belongingness into school-based DEI programs. 

An example of a belonging initiative regularly recommended by DEI consultants is the creation of student affinity groups. An affinity group is said to provide a safe space for students of the same race or identity – but only among those of a marginalized identity – to share their experiences, discuss difficulties and other issues related to their identity, and support one another academically and emotionally. Student affinity groups are particularly popular at private schools and are said to promote a sense of belonging among that identity group. 

Yet despite how helpful these programs try to sound, parents may sense there’s something not quite right about the word belonging, that it might have a double meaning they don’t fully understand. After all, at social gatherings when introducing your spouse, you never say, “meet my husband Phil, he belongs to me.” 

In its benign form, belonging is good -- a human emotional need to be accepted as a member of a group, such as friends, school, a sports team, church, or family. It inoculates humans against loneliness and isolation. However, once one peels back the layers of belonging as it is defined by social justice advocates and examines its origins and ulterior motives, the rush to belonging counsels caution. This is especially true in schools, where the push for belonging can affect those most vulnerable and at risk -- our kids.

The real reason social justice theorists and advocates push belongingness in schools is to instill in our children a desire to belong to the group or institution of their choosing, not of the child’s or family’s choosing. Individual or family values are to be replaced with a new set of values and virtues. Purpose and meaning are to come from the belonging itself. 

The other danger of belongingness, particularly as it is used in the school context, is interference with normal child development, particularly a child’s sense of agency and autonomy. Belonging substitutes the supremacy of group values and norms over the child’s individual or family values and norms. The need to belong inculcates obedience, conformity and subservience to the collective will and collective good. 

The development of a child’s sense of morality, which should never be the provenance of public schools, is interfered with when they belong to the collective. Individual preferences and doubts about collective actions are to be subsumed to the group’s will.

Other problems with over identification with a group include diffusion of responsibility, group polarization, intolerance of minority viewpoints, and increased risky, antisocial and delinquent behaviors.

Veterans of the culture war who have delved into its postmodern and Marxist underpinnings feel alarm instead of unease when institutions embrace and push belonging. Those aware of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in China or the atrocities committed by Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, where children were considered to possess special knowledge and purity of thought, understand the dangers of such ideologies taken to their maximum intent. Given this historical context, surrendering our children to the state is simply unacceptable. 

And why belonging among a number of human needs that society values, particularly of its youth? For example, why not safety and security, autonomy and freedom, purpose and meaning, competence and mastery, achievement and success, love and connection?

When schools talk about belonging they take advantage of people’s good intentions and common sense interpretation of it as a human emotional need, but schools use it more in its primary definition as a claim on property. Yes, schools mean to claim your children as belonging to them, or more broadly, to the collective. Remember “it takes a village to raise a child.” Their real intent is to drive a wedge between you and your child.

In critical social justice theory, just as it was in communist states, this claim on your child is intentional. This claim can be traced back to Marxism and its post-modern descendants.

Friedrich Engels in his work “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1884) viewed the traditional family as a means to ensure the perpetuation of private property through inheritance, which led to the exploitation of children and oppression of women. Thus he opposed the traditional family structure and proposed a collective responsibility for childcare by the state rather than the family. Lenin famously said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

Educational philosopher Paulo Freire, the patron saint of current American schools of education and founder of critical pedagogy, famously viewed schools not as institutions to educate children, rather as responsible for raising the consciousness of the oppressed, called conscientization, and making them agents of social change to actively challenge structures of oppression.

Thus we see belonging initiatives like the Every Kid Needs a Champion movement, which encourages every student to connect to a “caring, trusted adult” at school. If that doesn’t immediately elicit alarm, you’ve been duped by good intentions and have abandoned your responsibilities as a parent. The concept of a trusted adult is a boundary violation and ‘grooms’ children to accept boundary violations from strangers. This sets a dangerous precedent that can be exploited by an adult, and not just at school. Let’s face it, child predators choose vocations that provide access to victims. This is not to say all teachers and administrators pose a threat to children -- almost all of them do not. But some do and the risks of being wrong will inalterably change a child’s life.

Belonging as it is commonly used today is also in tension with a fundamental right and Western value – freedom of association. Implicit and central to this right is that all associations are voluntary. Blood oaths and pledges of allegiance to groups are antithetical to the classical liberal tradition. Even our personal associations, with friends and in relationships, are voluntary. We all reserve the right as individuals to disassociate. This fundamental component of the freedom of association is often forgotten by Americans. The freedom to associate includes the freedom to end the association, and the freedom to deny association. Belongingness, with its ownership connotation, minimizes that requisite quality, particularly among children. Kids, with their less developed sense of morality and autonomy, go along to get along.

The opposite of voluntary is compulsory. Thus it comes as no surprise that frequently schools pushing belonging initiatives compel membership of all students into at least one student club. These forced associations entail risks and demand conformity.

This encroachment into a fundamental right extends into a child’s sense of civic and interpersonal agency. Since as far back as Horace Mann and the common school movement civic engagement has generally been agreed upon by society as a responsibility of public schools. This view is that public schools should develop well-rounded individuals with the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to participate effectively in a democratic society. This view holds that schools play a crucial role in socializing children, fostering their moral and civic development, and preparing them for their future roles as citizens, workers, and community members.

But Americans have always drawn the line when civic engagement crosses into political activism. Teachers and administrators are prohibited from indoctrinating students into any political belief system or ideology, though one would be hard pressed to recognize the prohibition given the current state of schools. While Freire and his disciples may have explicitly advocated for turning students into political activists, this wish is fundamentally at odds with the American conception of the purpose of schools. 

Belonging blurs this boundary further as it binds the child’s allegiance to the school first, to clubs, and to cosmic political causes like ‘social justice’ and ‘decolonization.’ Children are told by ‘trusted adults’ on school campuses that they know better than parents what the real injustices of the world are. And children are privately told their deepest secrets are safe with trusted adults on campus, often under cover of law. 

Belonging carries additional baggage in its current social justice usage. Like its cousin inclusion in the DEI alphabet soup, it doesn’t mean what most people think it means. Inclusion in social justice theory means to create a welcoming environment, particularly for marginalized groups. That in turn entails the exclusion of anything or anyone that could cause said marginalized member to feel unwelcome. That leads to the Kafkaesque situation in the present day where in the name of inclusion, colleges enact speech codes that allow censorship and cancellation of individuals who cause marginalized individuals to not feel included.

Similarly, belonging requires certain illiberal policing. As James Lindsay has observed:

A common trope regarding diversity, inclusion, and belonging is to say that … “diversity is having a seat at the table, inclusion is having a voice, and belonging is having that voice be heard.” In that sense, “belonging” refers to a space catering to the person or people who are mandated to be made to feel like they belong there. Thus, while inclusion is a push to make sure that someone never faces attitudes or power dynamics that might lead them to feel awkward and excluded, belonging takes this further and demands that those people are intentionally made to feel welcome and even special (lest otherwise they feel marginalized, silenced, or harmed). Belonging is said to form a sense of community.

The elevated status of certain marginalized groups on school campuses in intersectional theory demands that schools ‘center’ and ‘elevate’ their presence and their voices, and respect and validate their viewpoints and personal habits over that of other students. This leads to what is called ‘main character syndrome’ – the belief of certain favored individuals that they are the central figure in their own narrative, much like the protagonist of a story.

Thus in pursuit of belonging and inclusion, many students are told to keep quiet, lest they encroach into the victim group members’ spotlight. 

Have no doubt, when your child develops a sense of belonging at school, they belong to the club, the school, the state, the collective, and not to you, and they have a role they are expected to fulfill.