Overcoming Mistrust

A group of people may at any time choose to enter into agreements, agreements that are not legally enforceable, whose basis is trust.

Take the example with which I began: say I’m a teacher with particular ideas about education, and I want to start a school. I don’t want to start a big, highly funded, world-class school for rich kids. I want to start a little, odd-ball school for kids whose parents share my values and like my ideas. (All this is in fact true.)

 

As we've seen, there are major legal barriers to this—but if the parents were prepared to trust me, and I them, it could be possible. The kids could be officially homeschooled, so that the school would, legally, be only a learning center, which means a lot less regulation. If it was small enough, it could be run out of someone’s home—mine or one of the students. If it got larger, we’d have to rent a space. But if I trusted the parents—trusted them not to sue me—maybe I could do without all the insurance.

 

- Trusted them not to sue you? You’d be a fool to do that.

- I think what you’re calling a fool is just what I want to be. And if, god forbid, a kid gets injured or killed, and their parents break their word and sue me, and if it ruins me, then let me be ruined. Ruin is something we need to be less afraid of if we want to begin to trust, if we want to live differently. A precondition of trust will be a different way of looking at misfortune. Ruin—especially financial ruin—is a holy state. I can’t choose it, but if it chooses me, I’ll try to learn to be glad of it. When Jesus tells the rich young man, “Give away all your possessions and follow me,” he is not recommending charity but poverty itself; and the man goes away sadly not because he lacks the will to help others but because he had great possessions and cannot bear to give them all away. Everything I think I own is a burden and a lie: nothing is mine for keeps, and when I know that I’ll walk lightly over the earth.

- It’s easy to talk about the holiness of poverty when (a) you don’t have any dependents and (b) you have family and friends who can bail you out in an emergency. 

- True. But we all should have people to fall back on in a crisis. This is part of what it means to be in community with others. Imagine you were sending your kids to a wonderful weird little school, and then one of the students got injured in an accident, and a parent sued, and the school was in danger of going under—wouldn’t you do what you could to keep the place and the people who ran it afloat?

 

But it’s stupid—or it’s wrong, it’s nonsensical—to trust someone to keep a promise they never made, so the parents would have to take a kind of oath not to sue in the case of an unforeseeable accident. But doesn’t that sound like a weird thing to ask people: give me your children, let me educate them off the grid, and promise not to sue me if something goes wrong. Who would agree to that? Well, only another fool: the kind of fool who knows that a pile of money will not heal their child nor bring her back from the dead, that it will only profane, degrade and mock their grief. These parents must be fools anyhow to risks their children’s futures, their college prospects, on a weird little home-school run by a nut like me.

 

So, I must find a group of parents as foolish as I, and as affirmed in their folly, as determined to persist in it, to see it through. 

 

But where do I find these parents? That is the question.