If what it means to be 'educated' has changed, why hasn't the mechanism for becoming educated? #WednesdayWisdom
A response to this tweet soon followed:
Has what it means to be educated actually changed?
In all honesty, as I thought about this question, I became unsure...
Can someone actually receive an education? Is it bestowed, or is it achieved? Is it stalked like prey, or is it discovered like a treasure? Is it slain like a dragon, or liberated like a besieged castle? Is it built like a house, or conjured out of nothing like an alchemist's elixir?
Or, perhaps, an education is simply the sum of that which sticks.
When someone says, "I got a crummy education in high school," what do they actually mean? What did they learn? If the answer is "nothing," who is to blame?
I don't entirely know where I'm going with this, but I saw a circularity to three interactions with students this week.
1. During a "This I Believe" speech, one of our 9th graders spoke about the reality that there's more to life than getting into Andover or Harvard...that getting over the pressure, embracing her own trajectory--one that was a complete rough draft, a work in progress--mattered more than anything else.
2. I watched a former student toe the line at Hayward Field in Eugene, OR last night. He had run on the cross country team when I was the assistant coach during my second year of teaching. He had been fast, but nothing extraordinary. I watched this student run 1500 meters in 3:41. He qualified for the finals on Friday. Surrounded by nearly 10,000 screaming fans, with the name of his Ivy league college adorning his chest, he breathed, strained, and exploded across the finish line in a blur of euphoria, sinews, and sweat.
3. I ran into the father of a former student last week. In 8th grade, the student had been in my advisory, and the family shared their plan for college: "[She] is going to get a college scholarship for field hockey," they said. "That is the plan." And it worked. Four years later, she enrolled at Quinnipiac University on a full scholarship. In the first week of practice during her freshman year, she tore her ACL. Over the course of the recovery process, she realized she wanted to play sports at a Division III school--there would be less pressure, more opportunity--and she transferred to a small college in North Carolina. A year later, she realized that in all of the pressure of making field hockey her life, of attending camps, practicing, practicing, practicing, it wasn't what she loved to do anymore. She had lost the love of the game that identified her. So, again, she transferred. This time, she wanted to go somewhere that was big enough for her to stretch herself, to reclaim her identity, to discover herself again...to be free. "So she's headed to Ohio State in the fall," her dad told me. "And she wants to be a teacher! Can you believe that...she loves it, loves the kids, the possibilities."
One of these students has carved his place in the world through sports. Another found that, once life humbled her--threw her a different direction, a new opportunity--it granted her the opportunity to explore her surroundings, to slow down and ask, "Who am I?"
One of my favorite educational theorists, bell hooks, wrote about this in the first book about teaching I ever loved, Teaching to Transgress:
“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”
Sometimes, it's a different mountaintop.
When I was 16, I was in a horrible car accident.
Horrible.
I was driving, I became distracted, swerved, overcompensated, hit the snow at 65mph and went airborne.
It took them three hours to dig the car out.
Miraculously, all four of us survived this wreck.
It took a long time for me to heal.
Another thing this accident did, though, was it forced me to stop playing soccer and lacrosse.
I took up running. I started writing poetry.
Suddenly, running and poetry were what sustained me.
I wrote this--the beginning of a poem about what life was teaching me--a year later as I continued to process what it meant to have the view of my life change; what it meant to have my plan erased.
Here's what the unexpected does to us: it complicates things...it makes us hurt...it cauterizes our innocence...it curdles the sweet parts. But it also grows us, prunes us. It makes us free.
As 17 year-old me once wrote, we've always wondered about this freedom, but we've never known to ask.
Freedom is scary, but it is new, and if we take the opportunity to reconnect with the present-tense version of ourselves, we gain perspective.
And that's when, as bell hooks goes on to explain, "education [is] about the practice of freedom."
At moments of rebirth, our education really begins.
Education hasn't changed, it's still about the practice of freedom. If we can invite the personal into our educational narratives; if we can embrace the humbling moments of failure, struggle, and interrupted plans, then we can reclaim the mechanism for becoming educated, and liberate that beautiful, beating glob of muscle in our chests.
This is a great post and one that I would be interesting in sharing with the parents and my 9th graders as they enter my class next year. It might provide them with an interesting perspective as to why they are going to school and learning what they are learning.
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