What Gets Covered in ‘Coverage’?

Lloyd’s in the early 19th century (above). The insurance business has been around longer than the word “coverage.”

Curricular conversations nationwide lament, cheer, and debate the decline of something once called, without irony, “coverage.”

More than a decade ago, a senior art historian confided to me that “coverage is dead.” Art history required new ways of thinking about what gets taught and how.

Many of us, though, may still think in terms of some sort of coverage.

We will cover the history of trade wars since 1918. We will cover the development of the concept of modernity. We will cover the many ways people have created families.

These ideas of coverage, bound to a belief in some sort of completeness, turn on chronology, if not history.

This coverage is a metaphor. It feels spatial.

And so we debate whether ideas and events can be coherently structured to “cover” the subject, as if teaching were something like facing a dingy room with a paintbrush and a can of fresh paint.

But there is another kind of coverage that has become a signal characteristic of  modern life: the desire to be shielded from misfortune and accident by providing financial or in-kind compensation.

In the marketplace of ideas, we grapple with the idea of coverage.

In the marketplace of the marketplace, almost every mechanical or electronic purchase comes with an insurance plan of some kind, offering something called protection.

It is, or so the manufacturer hopes, an offer you can’t refuse.

The Oxford English Dictionary assures us that the earlier sense of coverage is about protection, not completeness. Although the insurance business has been around for centuries (think Lloyd’s of London), the term “coverage” doesn’t emerge until 1912.

Here’s the OED’s earliest example: “There will be nineteen policyholders disillusionized and disgusted with the limited coverage contract.”

Note to language historians: “Coverage” enters the English language already as a form of disappointment. (Also, I love the term “disillusionized.”)

The other, spatial sense of coverage arrives by 1930, when the term is used to identify the range of radio transmissions. The following year, the term appears in reference to journalistic coverage of an event.

Satisfying completeness, comforting risk-protection: Our sense of coverage seems to invoke two complementary ideas, and each feels a bit like a dream.

In some ways, the classroom is a space where both dreams meet: the dream of completeness and the desire to be kept safe, perhaps from ignorance, perhaps from uncomfortable or dangerous ideas, perhaps from one’s own weaknesses.

I’ll couple coverage with safety and placed them on the same rug so that I can pull it out from under both.

Coverage isn’t bad or dead, but it feels increasingly like the wrong term  for what we do, and for what we promise. No class covers everything. All by itself, no class can guarantee anything, either.

Teaching is so complicated, so high-wire, so very much about inventing the moment while orchestrating the exchange of  knowledge that those of us who do it know instinctively that every class is different, every class a risk.

If I’m right, the idea of coverage is overdue for a dismantling. Not that the teacher doesn’t want to explore questions and energize students, but the dream of completeness is just that, and if coverage lures us into thinking that that’s what we’re doing, then we need another term for what we do.

And so the beginning of an imagined course description: “In this class, we will risk thinking together about some questions that have formed and are changing the world in which you live, right now, today.”

The risk of thinking, the sometimes scary openness of questions. No assurances.

Yes, a few students may be, like those 1912 policyholders, “disillusionized and disgusted with the limited coverage.”

It isn’t easy not to pretend to completeness, but isn’t completeness — or coverage — a fantasy anyway?