the hegemony of fast runners

Living in New England for the past year, I have found myself finding ways to understand the communities I pass through. One main way that helps me to know how I feel about a place is the general tone of drivers on the roads. The less aggressive, the softer my heart feels towards that town or state.

With children, this cultural synechdoche takes places in a similar way. Instead of judging places, children spend more time figuring out one another. How does each member of a group contribute to that group? What skills do they contribute? What makes up important social capital?

While spending a lot of time with middle schoolers during the last two years, the more I listened, the more I heard about the most important capital of all: how fast can you run? This can change everything. If the quiet kid suddenly outruns an individual universally acknowledged to be a fast runner, that quiet kid will be instantly revered, a valued member of the group.

All children have a running list of who runs the fastest in any given group they are part of. This makes every running game more interesting than just surface level. At environmental school, we would play such a tag game every Thursday. At the start of my 2nd year facilitating this game, I finally came to understand the secondary game going on below the surface. Everyone was talking about it with amazement: A very fast kid was tagged by a less fast kid! The social order had been altered.