Education: A Communal Experience

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:07:44 -0500

Education is the great communal experience. We go to school 180 days a year, for 13 years of our life, and many of us continue along the educational path much longer. We can discuss similar teachers, extra-curricular activities, lunch room antics, multiplication tables, and books. Education, as an American communal experience, is meant in one part to build our national pride, and to also fuel the American dream. We go to school and are taught to expect the best for ourselves, our families, and our communities. Every child can walk into a school at five years old and come out believing he/she can accomplish anything. This, we say, is what education is all about: It is the bridge between social classes. It eliminates racial misconceptions. It conquers over prejudice and bias. It allows anyone, anywhere, to be anything they want to be.

Or so I thought.

As a prospective teacher I had all these grandiose feelings of education wrapped up inside of me. After failing to pick a major during my first two years of undergrad, I suddenly had an epiphany: I enjoyed reading. I loved writing. I valued the deeper meaning and critical aspects of literature. I had amazing experiences working with children and teens. I wanted to be an educator. This decision was so significant because it gave me a purpose and drive to succeed in the next two years. Sometimes making the choice is the most challenging part of life (I’ll touch on this later) and I relished the opportunity to make a difference.

This calling to “make a difference” had been ingrained into me from a variety of life experiences. I grew up in the small suburban town in Pennsylvania. I stayed in the suburban district K-12 and graduated with thirty-six of my closest friends and peers. For as much as my educational experience was sheltered and confined, my summers were spent visiting other cultures and nations, taking in the diverse political, social, and religious constructs that make each of them so unique.

When I was fourteen I went on my first of three trips to London and to help run kids camps at an after-school community center. I was stationed in Southall, the heavily Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu section of London, and was fascinated by the way such distinct communities of people could live in such close quarters. I was seventeen when I worked with Food for the Hungry in Guatemala. My group built a community center, again held a kids camp, and felt the simultaneous awe and fear of sitting side-by-side complete strangers during an earthquake. The experience helped me realize how emotions and reactions are a universal phenomenon. I spent the previous two summers in South Africa and Swaziland, volunteering at an AIDS clinic, running kids camps, preparing a community structure to be used for a medical clinic, church, school, and food shelter. I met thirteen year-olds who walked ten miles to school everyday, only to walk ten miles back at night to take care of their younger siblings. I saw education as a bridge out of this poverty, but the reality of the situation didn’t allow the children there to even know the bridge existed.

These children and teens in Africa, and all across the world in developing nations, don’t know what it is like to have the opportunity to be anything they choose to be. Similarly, the children and teens in America don’t know what it is like to not have this opportunity. Many people might disagree with the broad generalization laid out in the two former sentences, but it is the present overwhelming reality. Yes, there are communities and schools in America that do such a horrible job at fostering hope, that the children and teens don’t have this belief. And yes, there are developing nations changing the fate of their children and country with education. However, these are the exceptions, not the norm.

Currently, as a high school English teacher, I engage with some of the most impressively bright and talented young people on a daily basis. Many of these skilled individuals will go on to college and be whatever they choose to be, and become successful American stories. But some of these bright and talented young people will, for a variety of reasons, become disengaged from school. Instead of seizing the American dream and using education to go anywhere, be anyone, do anything – they take it for granted, which in my opinion is worse than never having it at all.

And so we are left with the present state of education in America…misused potential.

Education Is My Life

Education: A Communal Experience