NFTs, Chromebooks, and Democracy

“Respectfully, what is this biology class gonna do for me anyway? I could be on the block making money right now. Matter of fact I could come up on NFTs. It’s really no point to this.”

This was not the first time a student questioned the purpose of school by alluding to selling drugs as a way to make money in the present instead of waiting for the employment promised after graduation. It was, however, the first time NFTs were used as an exit from the curriculum, reminding me that even after six years in education, there will always be room for a first.

Sometimes I hesitate to share the demographics of the place I work because I think they will tell the Frankenstein story that exists in our collective imagination about inner city kids, the hood, public schools, and poverty, way before I can tell the story I want to share. I know when I say I work in the South Bronx people might generate their idea of the classroom from fractured news headlines, The Wire, rap songs, and hand me down anecdotes on “those” parts of the city. Sometimes the story I want to share is not a story, but a question.

If he wants to, why can’t this student learn about NFTs, or more generally cryptocurrency, right now?

Before the story and after the question, sometimes there is a series of facts.

Home to one of the most diverse cities in the world, New York State is also the most segregated school district in the United States for Black students and second most segregated for Latino students. (The first for Latino students is California.)

I work at a public charter high school in the South Bronx where out of 1200 students, 43% identify as Black and 56% identify as Hispanic or Latino. This leaves 1% of the students who are Asian, White or fall into the category of “Other.” A UCLA study found that in the Bronx between 2010 to 2018, charter schools have become even more segregated.

The segregation doesn’t stop with race and ethnicity. Segregated schools often have upwards of 75% of their students living in poverty. This type of double segregation is corrosive, leading to high teacher turnover resulting in less experienced teachers delivering narrow curriculums. The idea that a school could be separate but equal doesn’t exist in American cities that are divided along both racial and class lines.

Cryptocurrency is segregated in the other direction. According to a report by Gemini the “average” cryptocurrency owner is a 38-year-old male making approximately $ 111k a year, with 74% of crypto currently being owned by men, and 77% being owned by people who are white.

When this student first mentioned NFTs to me, it was the edge of 2021. While some of these terms and concepts have existed for over a decade, a flurry of collective dialogue around cryptocurrency, NFTs, web3 and the metaverse had occurred in the months leading up to the year’s end. Dialogue ranged from confusion to panic on how to get involved; excitement at the idea of average people having more control of their money, art and social media, and fear of what this imagined immersive technological landscape would look like.

This was at the same time my school went remote for a month due to the omicron surge of COVID in NYC.

The NYC Internet Master Plan found that about one third of NYC households don’t have broadband connection at home. At the height of the pandemic, the NYCLU found that 14 percent of NYC students didn’t have a device to use when most schools were posting work on Google Classroom or holding classes over Zoom. Schools scrambled to provide each of their students a device. The Department of Education (DOE) distributed iPads after negotiating a deal with Apple, prioritizing students in shelters first (about 1 in 10 students in NYC was in a homeless shelter between 2020–2021.) Still the demand was too high.

In March 2020 my district provided, given their family was able to be reached and able to come to the school, each student a Chromebook — perfect for Zoom classes and Google Docs, and useless for anything else. By December 2021 we were remote again, with students waiting on replacements for Chromebooks that were no longer working, operating with missing keys, and petitioning the unblocking of websites they wanted to use, including Youtube.

It was strange to sit in my living room on those snowy days leading up to the holidays with friends texting me about .eth domains and blockchain gas prices to mint their NFTs- while also getting texts from students about how they did not have a working Chromebook or that their internet was out.

It wasn’t strange that there were two starkly different realities. There hasn’t been a time that living in NYC hasn’t felt divided to me. Riding the train from the Bronx through Manhattan to Brooklyn, bootleg Canada Goose jackets change to real ones and then back again. The train goes from local and stuttering to express and functioning and then back again.

No, the divide wasn’t the strange part. What was strange was how much of Web3’s fantasy was precisely the same thing segregated youth in NYC wanted.

At the core of the vision of Web3 (it’s still relatively early, this could all be a fever dream) are ideas of freedom, self-governance, and hope for a future that is creative, meaningful and adaptive — these are the same ideas and ideals that NYC youth want and deserve, but do not have the infrastructure to support.

Before the pandemic schools were given many different purposes- from setting people up to work, to sending them to college, to ensuring our democratic nation had informed citizens. When schools were closed during the pandemic, the purpose of schools quickly became to allow parents to go to work and for children to be fed. And while the pandemic is still not over, the aftermath of 2020–2021 has left schools in an undefined space.

I haven’t seen the student who said he’d rather sell NFTs than learn Biology in a few weeks now. I’ve only ever seen him a handful of times the whole school year. Each time I see him, our interaction is pleasant. I remind him he is brilliant and I wish I could see that in the classroom. Some days he tries, other days, before he walks out of class, he again asks what’s the point of this education in the new world he lives in. Everyday, the walls of the building ask me the same question.