Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Mike Hisey, dressed as U.S. President Donald Trump in a prison jumpsuit, reads The New York Times edition on Mr. Trump's tax avoidance over the past two decades in front of the newspaper's offices in New York City, September 28, 2020.

No one likes to pay taxes. That might be among the most universal of truths.

But in Germany, where a progressive rate can go as high as 45% on individual income, levies are not as polarizing or political as they are in the United States. Florian Demmler, for one, is happy to pay his taxes each year.

“Most people really enjoy the comforts of a strong government that gets a lot of tax from us,” says the head of marketing for a German law firm. “They build streets, schools, and hospitals with that money, and we have a good health system and strong social security system.”

At the heart of that sentiment lies trust that the money is spent to boost the collective good, and that every German pays his or her proper share. So the revelations that U.S. President Donald Trump only paid $750 the year he was elected into office – and spent a decade paying nothing due to extensive financial losses – would probably provoke outrage in a German context, says Dr. Tabea Bucher-Koenen, an economist with the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. “They’d probably get someone to step down and replace him or her with someone else. That’s happened with other politicians who have been accused of taking advantage.”

On the face of it, the story of President Trump’s returns is more about debt than taxation. He’s taken pains to market his brand as a successful billionaire businessman. This week’s disclosures that he’s secretly reported losses for years and incurred massive personal debt threaten to burst that image.

But paying one’s due into public coffers reflects citizen values and ethics around the greater good. As the inequality gap widens in the United States and other parts of the world, a leader’s failure to pay his or her fair share would garner moral outrage.

“These perceptions about taxation, they’re not just a ‘here and now’ kind of thing. They are rooted in some deep values,” says Trish Hennessy at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The tax “bargain”

Tax morale – broadly defined as the intrinsic willingness to pay tax – is generally higher in countries that take in taxes at higher ratios compared to gross domestic product, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report from 2019. The OECD calls this a “virtuous circle” between effective government performance and factors such as trust and voluntary compliance. OECD and Latin American countries surveyed showed a high morale, with more than 70% of the population reporting that they would never justify cheating on taxes. But the numbers drop to just over 50% in Africa and Eastern Europe.

In Canada, the Environics Institute for Survey Research found in a survey conducted this fall, on the vision of Canada post-pandemic, that respondents viewed taxes in a positive light by 64% to 24% – a sign of the understood “bargain” they represent, says Andrew Parkin, the institute’s executive director.

Americans have a high tax morale too and feel frustration with those individuals or corporations that don’t pay their fair share, says Vanessa Williamson, a tax expert at the Brookings Institution and author of “Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes.”

“If you go on Twitter, you’ll see so many people talking about all the taxes that they’ve paid, and how surprised they are to see they paid much more than the president,” she says. “It’s an assertion that you’ve done your part.”

In fact, a Pew Research Center survey in 2018 showed that Americans say paying taxes is key to what it means to be a good citizen, just behind voting.

But the American president’s own words from 2016 – that it was “smart” to avoid taxes – and his failure to provide his returns haven’t hurt him because of the hyperpolarization in U.S. politics. That means majority views, whether on gun control or taxes, don’t get reflected back into policy.

In Canada, Dr. Parkin says such revelations could hurt a sitting head more, simply because there is less polarization: sides aren’t just pulled to their camp on a particular policy or revelation, he says. “So people are much more likely to react to it in terms of whether this strikes them as fair.”

Trouble with corruption in Mexico

But in Latin America it’s not clear how far moral outrage over tax nonpayment would register.

The economic slowdown in Latin America starting in 2011, alongside high-profile corruption scandals in the public sector across the region, has led to increased inequality and less confidence in the government’s ability to deliver on their end of the democratic bargain. It’s helped create an environment where citizens feel they’re more justified in not paying taxes, according to the 2019 OECD report.

Mexico has one of the lowest rates of tax collection in Latin America, with a vast informal economy (roughly 60% of the workforce) and prevalent tax evasion by corporations and wealthy citizens. Part of the challenge in collecting more taxes is convincing Mexicans that their taxes are going toward services that benefit them.

Some 90% of Mexicans believe government corruption is a “big problem,” according to a 2019 Transparency International report. Standards need to change – not only for the private sector, but for public officials, says Eduardo Bohórquez, the director of Transparencia Mexicana, a nongovernmental organization and the Mexico-based chapter of Transparency International. In 2015, civil society pressured candidates running for public office to disclose their personal assets, potential conflicts of interest, and their taxes. They failed to win on tax transparency.

Yet, he says, if it were revealed that a Mexican president was shirking his or her tax responsibilities, “it would not only be a scandal. It would be a crime under Mexican law.”

Pressure, distrust, and duty

It’s also a serious crime in China – for anybody. The government may publicly shame those on a blacklist of offenders by publishing their names and identity card numbers, and by barring them from leaving the country, among other possible penalties.

The government has also used certain high-profile cases to set an example against dodging taxes. In July 2018, for example, popular Chinese actress Fan Bingbing disappeared for three months, only to resurface after being charged with tax fraud and slammed with a nearly $130 million bill. Ms. Fan apologized profusely to her tens of millions of fans on social media, while praising China’s ruling Communist Party in an apology that appeared to be coerced.

Distrust of government is one of the many reasons that India, a country of 1.3 billion people, only saw 37 million tax returns filed as recently as 2017. Some workers earn too little, work outside the formal economy, or, like farmers, are exempt. But it’s also a holdover from Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement, which sought India’s independence from British colonial rule and featured a central plank of nonpayment of taxes to a distant foreign power. And while India today is the world’s largest democracy, too many Indians hold the view that the government is simply not to be trusted to do anything with tax dollars of real benefit.

In Germany, meanwhile, “fairness” gives tax morale a boost. German taxation researchers have found individuals don’t necessarily choose tax schemes based on what’s “most beneficial to them.” Rather, “fairness considerations play a major role,” write the authors of the report, “Don’t Tax Me? Determinants of Individual Attitudes Toward Progressive Taxation.”

“German citizens expect that millionaires should pay high taxes, and pay even more than the average citizen,” says Bernd Pfeiffer, a tax adviser and member of Germany’s leading Christian Democratic Union. “People have strong feelings about their duty to pay a fair share of taxes.”

• Staff writers Howard LaFranchi and Ann Scott Tyson contributed reporting to this story.

Editor's note: The original version misstated India's status as the world's largest democracy.

If President Donald Trump’s portrayal of himself as the avatar of “law and order” is going to help him at the 2020 ballot box anywhere, it might be here in the key swing states of the Upper Midwest.

The target for the president’s tough message is white suburban and rural voters worried by protests that have, on occasion, led to arson and looting. And in 2020, Minnesota and neighboring Wisconsin have been at the epicenter of the social justice uproar over police violence against Black Americans, after the death of George Floyd under an officer’s knee in Minneapolis, and the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha.

Indeed, in Wayzata, a leafy town 16 miles from where Mr. Floyd was killed, it’s not hard to find residents who say the unrest has increased their support for President Trump. His uncritical support for police and diatribes about “violent left-wing extremists” appears to be solidifying and energizing his base.

Yet overall, polls indicate that the “law and order” tactic, reminiscent of the way Richard Nixon ran for the presidency in 1968, isn’t boosting Mr. Trump much in these northern states – or at least, not enough to win.

In Minnesota – a state his campaign is trying hard to flip red in 2020 – he trails Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 8.8 percentage points, according to a FiveThirtyEight average of major polls. And while the president leads with rural voters in the state, Minnesota suburban residents prefer Mr. Biden by a whopping 20 percentage points, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

In Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump won narrowly in 2016, he trails Mr. Biden by 6.7 points, according to FiveThirtyEight. Charles Franklin, a government scholar and director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee, says that the president’s visit to Kenosha in the wake of the destruction there improved his standing in the eyes of Republicans. But in a sense he was preaching only to the choir.

Ann Hermes/Staff

A Trump sign sits on the lawn of a home in Edina, a predominantly white suburb of Minneapolis.

“He’s not driving up his vote margin much, if at all, because he’s not shifting the views of independents whose votes might change,” says Dr. Franklin.

The “Blue Wall”

President Trump has made clear in recent days that he will not abandon his “law and order” rhetoric regardless of its apparent inability to move the needle in key states to this point. His Twitter feed continues to feature all-caps bursts of the phrase “LAW AND ORDER!” on a regular basis. At a recent rally in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, a wealthy and mostly white suburb of Pittsburgh, Mr. Trump invoked the “violent left-wing extremists” he claimed are supporting Mr. Biden.

“They will rip your cities apart,” he said. “They will go to the suburbs next.”

At the chaotic first presidential debate on September 29, Mr. Trump charged that if Mr. Biden “ever got to run this country ... our suburbs would be gone.” (“He wouldn’t know a suburb unless [he] took a wrong turn,” Mr. Biden retorted. “I was raised in the suburbs.”)

Four years ago, most pundits considered it a no-brainer that Minnesota and Wisconsin would go blue. Both have long histories of voting Democratic on the national level.

So many were shocked when Mr. Trump made both states competitive, winning Wisconsin (and neighboring Michigan) while coming within metaphorical inches of winning Minnesota as well.

In 2016, the GOP built an impressive ground game in Wisconsin prior to the election, doubling their outreach to voters and tripling their number of field offices. Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton thought the Badger State was such a sure thing that she never visited over the course of her campaign. She lost to Trump by 0.7 percent.

Mrs. Clinton won Minnesota, long the bluest Upper Midwest state, by 1.5 percentage points – the smallest Democratic margin in decades. Four years earlier, former President Barack Obama won by almost 8 percentage points.

Mr. Trump has long considered Minnesota the one that got away in 2016, and in 2020 it may be one of his few potential pickup states. To this point, the Trump campaign plans to spend more on ads in Minnesota than Wisconsin or Michigan.

To be sure, Mr. Trump stormed through the “Blue Wall” of the Midwest because of his unprecedented turnout in rural corners of these states. Still, the 2020 outcome here may ultimately hinge on the suburbs.

For proof, look no farther than the 2018 midterms. In Wisconsin, incumbent Republican Gov. Scott Walker lost reelection largely because he underperformed in the suburbs, with a big decline in his vote margin in the traditionally GOP “WOW” counties. In Minnesota, Democrats flipped two previously Republican congressional seats in the Minneapolis suburbs – victories that helped them regain a majority in the U.S. House.

The president’s “law and order” message is likely a thinly-veiled attempt to stop this suburban vote erosion before November. And in the Milwaukee and Twin Cities suburbs it may be working to some extent. Local Republicans say it is particularly appealing to white women, a voter group that was soft for the party in the 2018 midterms.

“Sure, there are some women who are on the fence, but that is getting slimmer and slimmer because of Kenosha,” says Nancy Kormanik, president of the Republican Women of Waukesha County in Wisconsin. “This is all happening too close for comfort. Too close.”

Ms. Kormanik says her membership has tripled over the past three years, now totaling around 145. And 10 of those new members were spurred to join after the events in nearby Kenosha, she says.

But suburbs are changing all over America. They are becoming more racially and economically diverse, changing their political outlooks. That’s happening even here, in the prosperous suburbs of the states at the top of the Mississippi River.

James Pierce for City Council

From a distance, the very tall Black man stands out in the largely white crowd at the farmer’s market in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis that is 88% white, according to the 2010 census. He is wearing a navy shirt that says, “James Pierce for City Council.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

James Pierce campaigns at the Edina farmers market in Minnesota. Mr. Pierce, an executive at Cargill, a global food corporation, is running for Edina City Council. “Our city council has been all white for forever, I don’t know how many years," he says. "We need a different perspective."

It is Mr. Pierce himself, accompanied by his wife and daughters, who are also wearing similar “James Pierce” shirts. They have come to the market to campaign while perusing ripe tomatoes and flower bouquets. Mr. Pierce is an executive at the global food corporation Cargill, and hopes to win an Edina City Council seat on November 3. 

“Our City Council has been all white for forever, I don’t know how many years. So we need a different perspective. We need multiple perspectives,” he says. “Given everything that’s been going on politically, I wanted to have a bigger impact in society.” 

To illustrate how, he tells a story about political lawn signs.

Supporters had been putting his signs up at night so they’d have an impact when people woke up and saw them. They had about 20 left, so Mr. Pierce decided one evening to take them out and deliver them himself. The sun had set, and his wife Stephanie looked at him and said, “Well no, you can’t do that.”

“So, I did a post to thank my supporters and say that I had this conversation with my wife saying I shouldn’t go out, and I talked about why,” he says.

Mr. Pierce grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. In the Deep South, racism was so overt that he just had lower expectations for the people who lived there, he says. In the Midwest, when he encounters similar attitudes, it affects him more.

“Because here, I have a higher expectation of people,” he says.

In certain communities, people think racism is a thing of the past, that they’ve come far and evolved, Mr. Pierce says.

“One of the things I do to try to shake people out of that thinking is, I say, ‘You know, I’m 51 and I’m the first person in my family who was born with the right to vote,’” he says.

But there’s another thing that’s different about the Midwest, he adds. People are willing to do something about it – to try to make a change to beat racism back.

His wife Stephanie is at the heart of a virtual book club consisting of herself and 19 white women, and that’s all they talk about. It was formed when friends reached out to her following the death of George Floyd.

“They are reading books, finding articles, and then getting on these calls every three weeks and saying, ‘What can we do differently?’” Mr. Pierce says.

Across the parking lot at the farmers market, Colleen Miner, president of the group Edina Indivisible, sits in a lawn chair in front of a “How to Vote” sign.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Colleen Miner provides voting information at the Edina, Minnesota farmers market. She says that after the death of George Floyd she was "stunned" to realize racism was still a problem in Minneapolis. “I feel ashamed that I didn’t know about it before, but I know it now,” she says. “And I’ve got to do something about it.”

Ms. Miner has always voted herself, but that was the limit of her political activism. No more, she says – the turmoil of American politics since the election of President Trump has woken her up. 

“I think of Minneapolis as a well-run, fair and just city – and after George Floyd, we find out it has a huge amount of racism. I was stunned because I’m in Edina, I’m in this bubble,” says Ms. Miner, periodically interrupting herself to ask passersby if they have questions on how to vote by mail.

“I feel ashamed that I didn’t know about it before, but I know it now,” she says. “And I’ve got to do something about it.”

Midwest racism

Over the past several years, with the rise of the ubiquitous cell phone camera, filmed incidents of lethal police force against Black Americans – often by white officers – have surfaced across the country, often invoking outrage, sometimes inciting violence.

Many of the most viral incidents occurred in the Midwest.

In 2014, for example, Michael Brown, a teenager, and Tamir Rice, a child, were both shot by white police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and Cleveland, Ohio, respectively. In 2016 Philando Castile was killed by a Hispanic police officer while inside his car in a suburb outside St. Paul, Minnesota. And this year saw the death of Minneapolis’ George Floyd and shooting of Kenosha’s Jacob Blake.

While cases of racial injustice happen across the country, “it’s not surprising” that the Midwest is a hotbed, says Christy Clark-Pujara, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When she travels to the U.S. coasts, Ms. Clark-Pujara, a Black woman who has lived in the Midwest her entire life, says people are surprised to hear where she’s from. And when she’s on campus in Madison, locals are surprised to hear she’s a professor. 

“A lot of times the media uses the term ‘Midwest’ to mean ‘white,’” says Ms. Clark-Pujara, adding that her own field of Midwest racial history has really only developed over the past 15 years.

“So when we envision, as a nation, the Midwest as this white space, something like Kenosha feels surprising,” she says.

Perhaps it shouldn’t. Last year, Milwaukee was rated #1 in the country for racial disparities by 24/7 Wall Street, a Delaware-based financial news and opinion company, with nearby Racine, Wisconsin, coming in second and Minneapolis coming in fourth. Nine of the top 10 cities on the 24/7 list are located in the Midwest.

“The silent majority”

In the suburbs surrounding Minneapolis and Milwaukee, a number of white voters said they approve of President Trump and his “law and order” rhetoric. If anything, some said, recent events had only solidified their intention to vote for him in the 2020 election.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Shoppers stroll through an outdoor shopping center in Wayzata, a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Strolling along downtown Wayzata, Minnesota, past a boutique aromatherapy shop and salons selling $48 shampoo, Doreen, a tanned mom in white Bermuda shorts sipping on a large iced Starbucks drink, says she made herself vote for Mr. Trump in 2016 because she didn’t like Mrs. Clinton. But now, she says she’s excited to vote for the president in November. She believes he knows how to get the economy back on track, and unlike the Minneapolis mayor and Minnesota governor, he will put a stop to protest-related violence.

“They even had to board up here in Wayzata for the [George Floyd] protests, and that was really sad,” says Doreen, who declines to give her last name. “I think the whole state will go red in Minnesota for the first time in forever,” she adds.

Further down the block, Nanci is walking toward her car with her husband and mother, carrying a bag of leftover food from their seafood lunch on the water. She says they spent lunch talking about the presidential race – all agreeing that violent protests in nearby cities this summer made them more determined to vote for Mr. Trump. Although they live just 20 minutes outside of Minneapolis, she says they don’t go into the city anymore due to the recent destruction.

“All of this violence in these Democratic cities – the Democrats don’t do anything about it,” she says. “Trump is for law and order, and so are we.”

Outside the post office in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, a small town that proudly proclaims itself “Rated #1 suburb by Business Insider in 2014,” Mickey, an administrative assistant with short blond hair, says the recent unrest in Kenosha has only confirmed her suspicion that Democrats – up and down the ballot – are too soft on crime.

“It seems like the cities with Democratic leaders, they’re just letting this run rampant,” says Mickey. “Whether that reflects on Biden personally, I don’t know – but it sure reflects on the party.”

As for the polls showing Mr. Biden with durable leads in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, Ms. Kormanik, of the Republican Women of Waukesha County, says they are likely inaccurate because of “shy Trump” voters who won’t tell pollsters who they really favor.

“The majority of women in Waukesha County are not confrontational. They will show their support at the polls and they will bring their families to the polls, but they will not come out and say who they really support,” says Ms. Kormanik. “The women here are the silent majority.”

Staff writer Christa Case Bryant contributed to this report.

Robert F. Bukaty/AP

Supporters of an effort to repeal ranked-choice voting carry boxes of signed petitions into the Cross Building near the state capitol in Augusta, Maine, on Monday, June 15, 2020. The state Republican Party is opposing ranked choice voting. But, barring a last-minute court ruling, the system is on track to be used this fall.

Ranked choice voting might be relatively new to the United States, but it’s been around for a while – both as an idea and in practice around the world. Now Maine may be on track to become the first state to use this method in its vote for president. 

The result, proponents say, could be a new degree of empowerment for voters, and boost for the concept of majority rule.

Not everyone supports the idea, and in September a judge in Maine ruled against a petition that would have blocked the system. Additional judicial review is expected in October, but for now the ranked choice method is moving forward in Maine. 

How does it work?

Elections in the U.S. typically use a plurality system, meaning whoever gets the most votes wins. However, it’s possible to get the most votes but still win fewer than 50% of the votes cast. Ranked choice voting tries to correct that, and ensure the winner has a true majority of votes. Instead of voting for a single candidate, voters in Maine will rank their candidates from No. 1 to No. 5. (The five candidates on the ballot are President Donald Trump; Democratic nominee Joe Biden; Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen; Green nominee Howie Hawkins; and Rocky de la Fuente, of the Alliance Party.) Voters don’t have to rank all the candidates. When the votes are counted, the candidate with more than 50% of the No. 1 votes wins.

If there is no one with an outright majority – more than 50% of the vote – the votes are recounted, with a twist. The candidate with the least votes from the previous round is eliminated, and the ballots with that candidate as No. 1 have their No. 2 slot counted instead. This pattern continues until there is a winner with an outright majority. 

It can be as relevant in presidential races as in down-ballot decisions. In 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won in Maine, despite not having more than 50% of the votes. (She won 47.8% of the total vote to Mr. Trump’s 44.8%.)

Where is it used?

Though Maine is the only state using ranked choice voting for all voters in federal elections, the voting method is used in various states and municipalities across the U.S. It was used in the 2020 Democratic primaries in Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii, and Kansas.

Massachusetts voters will decide Nov. 3 whether to adopt it for state offices and congressional races, and Alaskans will choose whether to institute ranked choice general elections, including voting for president. It’s also used in one form or another in a growing number of municipalities across the U.S., according to data from FairVote, which advocates for voting reform. Maine is unique in that all voters will be using it to select the president.

Outside the U.S., variations of ranked choice have been used in a handful of countries, including Ireland, Australia, Sri Lanka, and Estonia. 

Why use this method? 

Advocates say ranked choice voting allows people to vote for non-major-party candidates without feeling like they’re throwing their vote away. For example, Mainers who voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson or Green candidate Jill Stein in 2016 knew their choice probably would not win, so voting for them can feel like a waste. Under ranked choice voting, voters could have still put Mr. Johnson or Ms. Stein as their No. 1 choice, but then their vote would have transferred once those candidates were knocked out. 

Since the Maine law was enacted in 2016, it has faced challenges in the courts. The Maine Supreme Court ruled against a Republican-led petition drive to suspend the law. Detractors of ranked choice voting sometimes cite the confusion it can cause: It’s new, and requires voters to understand how to rank candidates. Additionally, opponents say the principle of “one person, one vote” is best served by the traditional system where whoever comes out with the most votes wins – without multiple rounds of counting in different ways. 

Ranked choice voting will also require more time and money to tabulate the results if someone doesn’t win a majority on the first round. It could also save money by avoiding the need for runoffs in states that require a majority to elect.

Additionally, ranked choice voting doesn’t always work as planned. One study found that in some U.S. municipalities that use it, if voters don’t rank enough candidates on their ballots – stopping after only marking their first or second choice, for example – the winner can still be someone who won a plurality, not a majority. 

Some scholars say that, in an era of polarization, a ranked choice system could tug candidates and parties toward the center as they see value in being voters’ second choice as well as their first. In effect, the system is designed to force candidates to achieve majority appeal, not just plurality appeal.

Supporters also say the system will give the electorate a more honest look at the strength of third parties, as fewer people feel compelled toward “strategic voting” for a candidate who might win, rather than for their preferred candidate.

Could ranked voting change the outcome of an election?

Yes. In the 2018 elections in Maine, Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin won the most votes after the first counting, which under normal circumstances would have meant he won the election.

However, the state was using ranked choice voting in that election, and Mr. Poliquin had not won more than 50% of the votes. He ended up losing after additional tabulations were made and his opponent ended up with a majority. Political scientists differ on how much and how often ranked choice voting might shake up races across the country overall.

How might this affect the presidential election?

Advocates say ranked choice voting helps eliminate spoilers, i.e., third-party candidates who don’t stand a chance at winning but who still might drain away votes from a Democrat or Republican in a tight race.

In Michigan in 2016, Mr. Trump won the state by just 11,000 votes. Neither he nor Mrs. Clinton had a majority. Political observers have speculated about what would have happened if third-party votes, largely for the Green and Libertarian Parties, had been redistributed under a ranked choice system. It’s possible the outcome would have changed.

But in Maine this year, with Mr. Biden polling well, the ranked choice system might not come into play at all at the presidential level.

The clear plastic face mask that Valérie Jarrosson wears cuts into her chin a little, but at least it doesn’t fog up her glasses like the cotton masks. The elementary school teacher considers herself fortunate – she has the space to stand at a distance from her students, while ensuring that they can still read her lips.

“It’s not ‘le voiture,’ it’s ‘la voiture,’” says Ms. Jarrosson, gesticulating animatedly and exaggerating pronunciations to the fourth grader in a hot pink T-shirt and tightly pulled bun standing at the blackboard. 

Ms. Jarrosson teaches at CELEM, a public school in Paris for children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Some of the students wear hearing aids, others have cochlear implants, but all of them rely on reading lips to communicate. Around 385,000 students with disabilities headed back to school in France this month. No one is learning remotely, unless a COVID-19 outbreak forces a change.

Children 11 and under are not required to wear masks. But universal mask-wearing for adults in France due to the pandemic has meant major challenges for teachers like Ms. Jarrosson, as well as those teaching the very young or French as a foreign language – their students all learn through lip reading, facial expression, and imitation.

There have been calls in France to make transparent masks free for teachers and 100,000 are on their way thanks to a government order. But that still won’t supply every teacher who has students with disabilities. And where the expectation is for the government to provide all the materials necessary for teachers to do their jobs, bearing the cost of a constant supply can feel burdensome.

The pandemic is forcing teachers of all types of students to rethink how they transmit language and the emotion necessary to make meaningful connections, and to create tactics for optimal learning in less-than-ideal conditions. 

When children are “learning to speak and read, they imitate letters by the sound the mouth makes,” says Cécile Viénot, a Paris-based child psychologist. Being able to see the motions of the mouth is “a learning tool, not just a vector of emotion.”  

Plexiglass for close quarters

Stacked at the back of Ms. Jarrosson’s classroom are the plexiglass barriers she places between herself and a student if she has to be in close proximity for a lesson. The seven-odd speech therapists on-site at CELEM also use them during individual sessions to help students process verbal language and improve pronunciation, volume, and pitch.

This tool, along with a stronger reliance on visual supplements to lip reading, like printed pictures, have become critical in the age of wearing masks, especially for the school’s youngest students who, at age 3, may not understand sign language yet.  

And when nothing else works, says Ms. Jarrosson, teachers are obliged to fudge the rules for a moment. “Sometimes I just have to pull my mask down and mouth it to them.”

That’s been the case for Elodie Riou – when her little students aren’t pulling her mask down for her. Ms. Riou works at La Villa des Enfants day care in the east of the city, with infants and children under 3. Ms. Riou says she often has to pull down her mask for a moment to smile at the youngest children and reassure them – many are starting day care for the first time. These first weeks of day care may be some children’s first extended exposure to adults wearing masks. 

Ms. Riou has been talking to the school’s director about starting a kind of informal sign language with the toddlers as a way to increase communication. The mask has made it harder to express emotion but also communicate with youngsters at the dawn of language learning.

“We’ve also thought about putting pictures up on the wall of people with different emotions,” says Ms. Riou, “to show them that emotions don’t stop at our nose.” 

But while Ms. Riou says she’s worried about the long-term consequences of wearing masks on young children and their ability to detect nuances of emotion, some experts say there is so far no need for concern.

“It’s still too early to say, but generally children have an incredible ability to adapt,” says Ms. Viénot, the psychologist. “For very young children and babies, they live in the immediate, so if something is wrong, they’re going to alert adults right away to meet their needs.”

But some say those with learning disorders or other disabilities can still suffer from wearing masks, in everyday life as well as in school settings. 

“We need to move forward with making clear masks free and available on a Europe-wide scale,” says Matthieu Annereau, president of the APHPP, a national disability-rights organization. “Because right now, people with disabilities are being penalized twice, having a handicap as well as not being able to understand when someone is speaking.”

Students behind masks, too

Even for those without a disability, the ability to understand speech from behind an opaque mask is a challenge. Claire Marchandeau has had to completely rethink her lessons at the Alliance Française, where she teaches beginner-level French to adults.

She’s taken to over-exaggerating her expressions, and has drawn out pictures of the mouth and its varying positions for different sounds, especially vowels, which she says are particularly hard to articulate non-visually. But the system only works one way.

“I can’t verify the position of my students’ mouths, to know if their tongue or lips are in the right place,” says Ms. Marchandeau, who wears a surgical mask to teach her group lessons. “Luckily, you can usually hear if something isn’t being pronounced correctly. I just make them repeat, repeat, repeat.”

The advantage, she says, is that students are forced to articulate every word. Shy students must speak up to be heard over their masks and oral participation is more important than ever. With students of many backgrounds and nationalities, the common denominator is a desire to understand and be understood. 

“It comes down to the different personalities of each student in how they interact in this new setting,” says Ms. Marchandeau. “But there’s no question on my end as the teacher – I can’t take my mask off.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

The luxurious, refurbished wooden train car rattles between the rows of houses in Amman, and Nasser Kawaldeh points outside the window.

“You see? We are moving along the Ottomans’ track,” he tells his grandson. “This is better than the history books.”

Indeed, just like when it was unveiled by the Ottoman Empire in 1913 as an engineering marvel, the Hejaz Railway today runs on the same tracks winding through Amman and southward into the desert.

Mr. Kawaldeh and his family were among 100 masked passengers who lined up last Friday morning for a ride on the Hejaz, with coffee thermoses, bags of popcorn, soccer balls, and drums in tow.

Children screeched with delight at the sight of imposing locomotives and wooden carriages that once carried Emir Abdullah, Jordan’s first king.

This fall, many Jordanians are discovering the train for the first time, thanks to a Jordanian Tourism Ministry campaign offering socially distanced discount trips.

Taylor Luck

Nasser Kawaldeh, who brought his children and grandchildren to ride the train, stands by a refurbished carriage belonging to the Hejaz Railway at the Al Jiza station outside Amman, Jordan, Sept. 25, 2020.

The Hejaz takes eight hours from Amman to the southern desert of Wadi Rum and eight hours north to Damascus, Syria, although the railway mainly runs trips to a station just outside Amman.

But the Hejaz is more than just an old train. It’s a living link to the past running on wooden and steel tracks that mark the birthplace of a nation.

Ottoman artery

The Ottomans built the railway with taxes and conscript labor to link their Arab provinces and ferry hajj pilgrims to Mecca. They ran 810 miles of track from Damascus through the arid deserts of modern-day Jordan and to the holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia, then known as the Hejaz. The train reduced a 40-day journey to a few days.

The railway was so crucial to Ottoman power and troop movement that it became the main target for the Great Arab Revolt led by Sharif Hussein, the great-great-grandfather of Jordan’s current monarch, King Abdullah II.

Sharif Hussein’s guerrilla attacks on the line in 1917-18 – as depicted in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” – helped seal the Ottomans’ collapse and the birth of what would be known as Transjordan.

Today, 270 miles of the narrow-gauge track runs through the middle of Jordan like a spine, from its northern border to southernmost tip, preserved and maintained by the Jordan Hejaz Railway company for Jordanians and tourists alike.

Taylor Luck

The Hejaz Railway train station in Amman, built with hand-cut stone by the Ottomans in 1910, now stands in the center of Jordan's bustling capital.

Despite growing up just a mile away from the Amman train station and walking over the track each day on his way to school, 28-year-old Mohammed Al Awad rode the train for the first time on Friday.

“This makes you realize that the past never died but still lives with us. All these great civilizations – Ottomans, the Romans – all came through Jordan,” Mr. Awad says as he sat for lunch with his parents and sisters at the Al Jiza Station, 20 miles from the Amman station.

“Today we are part of that chain of civilizations,” Mr. Awad says.

Mr. Kawaldeh says he jumped at the chance to ride the train, coming from his hometown of Jerash 30 miles northwest of Amman with his children and grandchildren.

“Our ancestors built this track,” Mr. Kawaldeh says. “By learning about our past, we Jordanians are learning about ourselves.”

Jordan as crossroads

When the Hejaz first opened in 1913, Amman was a village of a few thousand; its rail station and line ran alongside deserted hills of wild grass and shrubs.

Today, a capital city of 4 million has grown on either side of the track. Closely.

Leaving the Amman station, the train navigates houses, makeshift patios, and traffic jams, and cuts through the center of cemeteries, the metal undercarriage skirts within an inch of headstones.

Children race uphill and down at the sound of the locomotive, stopping at the tracks’ edge to shout and wave and, if they are fortunate, get a train horn blast back from the conductor.

Toddlers too small to follow their siblings poke out of nearly every window the train passes, their heads, legs, and arms dangling from window bars as they wave and point. An older couple sitting at a folding table near the tracks for their morning tea raise their glasses as the train rumbles by. 

Taylor Luck

A refurbished VIP carriage of the Hejaz Railway, featuring decor and furniture reminiscent of the train's first years with the added modern luxury of air conditioning, shortly before a journey from Amman, Jordan, Sept. 25, 2020.

In less than two hours, the Hejaz offers a glimpse into Jordan’s unique makeup as a crossroads of urban, rural, and nomadic Bedouin life – today and more than a century ago.

South of Amman, the claustrophobic apartment-dotted hills give way to sprawling factories, before melting away into wheat-swept plains and olive groves; people are replaced by sheep, donkeys, horses, and dogs herding flocks.

A few miles later, the train passes through squash and tomato farms whose seasonal workers stop their picking to watch the families rumble by.

As the train nears Al Jiza, the second station outside Amman, the wheat fields become parched and camels graze near the tracks, their camel-mounted Bedouin keeper raising his riding crop in the air in salutation. 

Al Jiza, built of hand-cut stone, is one of 20 stations that remain intact and in use in Jordan, unchanged from Ottoman times.

Tracking change

But the Hejaz is not just history for Al Jiza stationmaster Ahmed Masri; it’s personal history: He was born in the station house 50 years ago.

Mr. Masri’s father, who hailed from a Bedouin settlement near the station, worked maintenance on the railroad for decades, his family living in the station and adjacent house.

Now a 28-year veteran of the railway, Mr. Masri has seen many changes the past three decades.

“Before there was no electricity, no houses, no highway; the airport hadn’t expanded near the tracks,” Mr. Masri says as he motions to houses poking out from the desert.

Taylor Luck

An employee of the Jordan Hejaz Railway company peers out from the carriage platform as the train passes over a bustling Friday market in downtown Amman, Jordan, Sept. 25, 2020.

Once regular trips from Amman to Damascus are now impossible due to ongoing war.

Government plans to revive the Hejaz as a regional rail hub connecting the Gulf, Syria, and beyond are on hold amid a lack of funds and willing partners, and the need to overhaul the track for the modern, wider gauge used by its neighbors.

While Jordan’s Hejaz Railway still has nine British and German steam engines in service, some dating back to the 19th century, it now mostly runs Belgian diesel locomotives from the 1950s to keep down costs.

The telegraph line that once ran alongside the track is long gone.

The rail line practically disappears once it leaves southern Jordan and enters Saudi Arabia; there, much of the track has been uprooted by tribesmen or reclaimed by desert.

But one thing has stayed the same.

“The train still runs on time,” Mr. Masri says with a smile. “And everyone is welcome aboard.”

AP

South Koreans watch a Sept. 25 news program about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un apologizing for the killing of a South Korean official.

Hard conflicts sometimes need the soft touch of truth. That could now be the case for the two Koreas, which have been at odds for 70 years, either in all-out war or frequent violent encounters.

On Sept. 25, in a rare admission of fallibility, the “supreme leader” of North Korea apologized to the South Korean people. Kim Jong Un wrote in a letter that he was sorry for his military shooting a South Korean official found floating in the sea a few days earlier.

He also admitted the killing “will clearly” have a negative impact on inter-Korean relations. In the spirit of reconciliation, Mr. Kim promised such incidents would not recur.

Was his apology sincere? Or merely a self-serving charm offensive to split South Korea from its ally, the United States, which is deeply concerned about North Korea’s nuclear arsenal?

At the least, his apparent contrition lies in contrast to a similar incident in 2008, when a South Korean tourist was killed after straying into a North Korean military area. Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il and ruler at the time, did not apologize.

In addition to the apology, this third member of the Kim family to rule seems to be chafing under the aura of infallible leadership handed down in the propaganda machine set up by his grandfather, Kim Il Sung. (As part of the dynasty’s deification, all North Koreans must wear lapel pins with images of the late Kims.)

As with many leaders who rely on a personality cult, the humility to admit mistakes is often seen as a weakness – and dangerous. Yet in August, Mr. Kim told his people that his 2016 economic plan had failed due in part to his government’s “shortcomings.” In a country where it is a crime to criticize policy, Mr. Kim’s honest self-reflection could open a door for others to do so.

Last March, Mr. Kim told propaganda workers to move away from the “mystification” of him and focus more on his “human” side. If the people are mesmerized by a leader, he wrote, that might cover up the truth.

Three days after Mr. Kim’s apology, South Korean President Moon Jae-in followed suit. He apologized to his own people for his government’s failure to protect the citizen killed by North Korea. He said Mr. Kim’s apology opens an opportunity for dialogue. He proposed the two countries jointly investigate the incident.

Small gestures like an apology can often turn around a broken relationship. They hint that someone is willing to change. They help break down stereotypes of “the other” and point to a shared reality of truth and even affection. The Koreas have a long path to a permanent peace. Yet when leaders come off their false pedestals, it can set peace in motion.