Time as Capital: Rise of the Frantic Class

This was written by Paul Thomas who is Associate Professor of Education (Furman University). He taught high school English in rural South Carolina. Follow him on twitter here and read his blog here.  This post first appeared at Daily Kos.

by Paul Thomas

Imagine a world where time is capital.

This is the dystopian future of 2161 brought to film by Andrew Niccol's In Time (2011)—triggering some powerful parallels to Logan's Run (both the original novel from 1967 and thefilm adaptation in 1976).

Both Logan's Run and In Time expose the human condition in terms of age and mortality—in the first, life ends at 30, and in the latter, people stop aging at 25, but at a price, which involves time.

Science fiction (SF) as a genre presents us with allegory in the form of other worlds, as Margaret Atwood argues, and speculations, but the most engaging aspect of SF for me as a fan and teacher is when SF unmasks universal and contemporary realities by presenting those other worlds.

One of the recurring messages of SF is the crippling inequity that continues to plague human societies, such as the haunting and sparse Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” that forces reader to admit privilege exists on the backs of the innocent and oppressed.

The world of In Time presents an apparent meritocracy in which all people are given life until 25, when they stop aging but an embedded clock starts ticking forcing everyone to earn time in order to live. This deal with the devil positions all labor as literally necessary to live and puts banks at the center of who survives.

The Frantic Distraction of Surviving

Americans' faith in a meritocracy is often expressed in claims of the U.S. being a post-racial society as well as a classless society. Like the Hunger Games trilogy, In Time highlights class distinctions as people are segregated in Time Zones. Eventually, the narrative brings together the two main characters, Will Salas from the ghetto and Sylvia Weis from the affluent zone, New Greenwich.

Due to both personal tragedy and a huge gift of time from a stranger, Will confronts the norms of this dystopia while being hunted by a Timekeeper, Raymond Leon. One scene, I think, deserves closer consideration.

When Will travels from the ghetto through several Time Zones (incrementally costing him more and more time) to New Greenwich, he steps out of the cab and immediately begins jogging, a habit common in the ghettos since almost everyone is living, literally, from paycheck to paycheck (or under the weight of time loans, loan sharks, or pawn shops) until he notices that in New Greenwich people are eerily casual. This distinction comes up again when he is eating breakfast and the waitress notices that he isn't from New Greenwich because he does everything fast.

People in the ghettos, what can reasonably be called the working class and the working poor, lead lives that are so frantic that no one has the time to confront the inequity of the society, and because of the segregated society, these frantic workers have little insight into the lives of privilege, casual lives, that Will witnesses for himself and the viewer.

Also worth closer consideration is the role of the Timekeeper, Leon, who presents a truly complex character who functions under a code of ethics that is perfectly ethical within the norms of the culture, but ultimately self-defeating and dehumanizing. Timekeepers enforce the laws, primarily couched in time as capital, but because of their close proximity to crime, they carry with them only small quantities of time, thus leading frantic lives very similar to the working class/poor they help keep both in line and frantic.

Ultimately, Will exposes truths that challenge the norms of this society, truths that are in fact just as relevant to the world we now inhabit:

• Will discovers that time is not a limited commodity; there is plenty of capital, but the privileged create scarcity to keep the masses frantic, and distracted.

• Timekeepers as a police force are unmasked as not seekers of justice (Leon admits this directly), but as agents of the privileged.

• The moving target of the free market is exposed as not so much "free" but an arbitrary mechanism that puts most people in a life like caged gerbils on running wheels. Interest rates and prices incrementally increase daily as the workers accumulate time. The system is designed to keep workers trapped in their roles as workers.

• And privilege, as Le Guin's story shows, is always at the expense of others, captured by this exchange from In Time:

Sylvia Weis: Will, if you get a lot of time, are you really gonna give it away? 

Will Salas: I've only ever had a day. How much do you need? How can you live with yourself watching people die right next to you? 

Sylvia Weis: You don't watch. You close your eyes. I can help you get all the time you want.

In effect, while the details may be exaggerated, the lessons learned by Will are disturbingly relevant to contemporary Americans, as much as how it informs us as workers as it highlights that education reform is more concerned with producing workers than proving all children with equity, liberation, and autonomy.

Frantic Students, Frantic Workers: The Rise of the Frantic Class

The frantic state of being among the working class and working poor of In Time is a perceptive dramatization of the American worker, increasingly stripped of rights as unions are dismantled and the essentials of human dignity (income, health care, retirement) are further tied to being employed.

But the allegorical messages of In Time also speak to how and why current education reform claims and policies are designed to appease corporate needs for frantic workers.

One characterization of U.S. public education today is well represented in this dystopian world—frantic.

Current corporate education reform is built on implementing national standards designed to continue the historical call to incrementally increase both expectations and outcomes (the target for success in education has always been a moving target) so that students, teachers, and schools are always under duress, always falling short, always so frantic that no one can pause to question, challenge, or do anything other than comply.

Imagine a world where time is capital, where all of any person's time is spent compiling time, a fruitless cycle of acquisition, of seeking to comply with the mandates none of the masses have chosen for herself/himself.

But you don't have to imagine this.

This frantic world of In Time is the frantic existence of the American worker, and this frantic world is being fed by the corporate takeover of public schools where accountability, standards, and testing have reduced teachers and students to gerbils on running wheels.

In 2012, workers, students, and teachers are the frantic class; like Will, we don't have time:

Will Salas: I don't have time. I don't have time to worry about how it happened. It is what it is. We're genetically engineered to stop aging at 25. The trouble is, we live only one more year, unless we can get more time. Time is now the currency. We earn it and spend it. The rich can live forever. And the rest of us? I just want to wake up with more time on my hand than hours in the day.

The rising frantic class is necessary for the privileged few, the 1% controlling both manufactured austerity and the perpetually moving targets of success.

While universal public education was created to feed the promise of the American Dream, the current corporate takeover of public schools is driving the American Nightmare of the frantic class.

We don't need a movie to see that.

Sometimes I'm the distraction

Yesterday, I had my class in the computer lab where I read to them a short story. Afterwards, I asked them to write a blog post on our class ning. While they blogged, I walked around and read over their shoulders, sharing outloud for all to hear ideas that might inspire their blogging.

As I walked around the room, I saw one of my students deep in thought, pecking away at his keyboard. But then he stopped.

As I stopped walking and talking, he looked at me and said:

Could you stop talking? You are making me lose my focus.

I wasn't upset.

Or defensive.

Instead, I laughed outloud and smiled within.

I was proud.

I was proud that a student in my class felt comfortable enough to speak his mind. He wasn't rude about it. He waited for me to stop, made eye contact and asked me to stop.

He needed me to stop talking so that he could start thinking.

It was a good way to end the day.

Losing our way

Teachers encourage their students to prioritize and avoid distractions all the time. We employ all kinds of classroom management tactics to encourage a focused learning environment. However, perhaps more today than ever before, students are driven to distraction - and what's sadly ironic is that the adult's may be to blame.

In order to refocus ourselves, we need to understand what it means to properly prioritize.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain how defining and maintaining the essense of an idea can be so important:

It's hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we're to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of "dumbing down" or "sound bites." You don't have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by "simple" is finding the core of the idea.

"Finding the core" means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we've got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that's the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren't the most important idea. The Army's Commander's Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. you can't have five North Stars, you can't have five "most important goals," and you can't have five Commander's Intents. Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander's Intent - it's about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence. 

Because most teachers have curriculums that are bloated with content, it can be a real challenge to maintain our focus. With the advent of today's high-stakes, standardized testing accountability, teachers may be more apt to become distracted than ever before. As if printing students' test scores in the local paper wasn't distracting enough, now policy-makers want to tie teachers' salaries to their students' test scores with merit pay. We've gone from targetting teacher's pride to targetting their wallets. All of these distractions make it hard for teachers to focus on our primary objective: learning. And if the teachers are having trouble maintaining focus, you can only imagine how distracted the kids are.

In the military, the Commander's Intent intentionally remains vaguely focused on the primary objective. This way the original plan may go up in smoke, but you still execute its intent. In the classroom this translates into: If there's only one teacher left to teach, they better be doing something to help student's to learn.

Unfortunately, top management might know what their priorites are but be completely inept at sharing and achieving them.What's worse is that there is very good reason to believe things are worse than that- for too long education reform has been driven by politicians who are incompetent at even identifying the primary goal of education.

As you prepare for your next lesson, think not about what you can add to your classroom, but how you can peal away the distractors and make it obvious to every single student in your class that, in the end, students are in school to learn.