We fear education because it transforms our identities.
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I’ve traveled to 30 countries and have worked as a teacher in four: USA, Lithuania, Austria and Cuba. When I taught both reading and ESL (English as a Second Language), I had people of all ages from every continent. When I travel, my primary goal is a writer’s: to investigate how people think, feel and perceive. I consider myself a student of identity.
I’m starting with this background info because a recent conversation I had here at the community college with a young male student—let’s call him Tony—was similar to so many I’ve had in any number of places. Here’s the refrain, articulated in more words or less: If I learn that kind of stuff, my identity will change, and I don’t want that to happen.
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I was talking to Tony via Skype—I’m teaching a summer online Intro to Research—to help him gather sources for a research paper. My big-picture advice was for him to get into the habit of reading political, economic and scientific news from a variety of publications and a mix of political slants.
I give this advice consistently because the population I teach has barely any context or ability to discuss current topics or think about contemporary problems. They also haven’t been taught how to teach themselves.
Shouldn’t a student who’s worried about our culture’s capacity to read want to improve and cultivate his own reading skills?
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Tony was really skeptical about the advice. He wanted to know if some videos might help him “get the summary of the topic”. Interestingly, he had chosen to write about cell phone addiction and the internet’s negative effect on our capacity to concentrate while reading. He had already read at least some portion of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, choosing this book from over a dozen I put on a reading list.
I told him that reliable videos would most likely be produced by media companies or experts of some kind. If he wanted necessary background, vids could help him. But shouldn’t a student who’s worried about our capacity to read and concentrate want to improve and cultivate his own reading skills?
The question bothered him. “I could get into reading certain books,” he said. “But nobody where I come from reads any newspapers or gets into politics.”
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Several years ago, I listened to Luis Alberto Urrea give a lecture to our students, the vast majority of them Hispanic, to discuss, in part, the question of leaving the barrio. Barrio translates to neighborhood, but the word has strong connotations. It can mean our own kind, and students have told me it really means the family to them.
Urrea’s lecture was nuanced, humorous and engaging. It provoked students to conclude what they always felt even if they didn’t talk about it: If you’re asking the kinds of questions we’re considering today—if you’re wondering what it would mean to leave the barrio—at least part of you has already stepped outside the barrio to evaluate it.
The lecture had a profound effect and produced lively class discussions. The idea was sensitive because leaving the barrio could, for many, be perceived as an act of betrayal. Obviously, you don’t need to leave physically.
Urrea did not accuse anyone of betraying anybody, but he did talk about the impact others’ perceptions have on us. Students posed a good question: if our elders or neighbors accuse us of betrayal, how can we argue with them?
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I’m using the example of the barrio out of convenience. This concept is not prescriptive to Latinos; if we think about it, we all belong to a barrio, perhaps the kind that says, “I can only accept Western thought. All other traditions are mumbo-jumbo.” Modern educators so often find themselves set up outside these fortresses of thought, contrived notions of certainty and safety.
I’ve written in a number of previous articles about the effect this socialization can have on men, especially when they are economically disadvantaged. I knew one student who had been exiled from his family for choosing college over work; he came to commencement alone, took a selfie after the ceremony and rode away on his bike.
Those kinds of students are strong and determined in ways most of us aren’t. They can embrace uncertainty and question or transcend the social identity they’ve inherited, shape a new one rather courageously. This courage is rare, so educators have a task to manage people’s natural desire to belong while presenting ideas that can be shockingly new. At the heart of higher education is this question: Why must you see things one way but not another?
It’s easy for us to single out economically disadvantaged populations, but I’ve encountered this fear of identity loss in other layers of society and in virtually any place I’ve visited.
If we concentrate on what community we’re losing, we won’t see what society we might gain.
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White middle class Americans used to get this way when you tried to talk to them about soccer (and some still do). I can’t like it or even know about it. It’s foreign.
Prior to the internet’s ubiquity, Europeans, especially in small countries, used to get this way when I tried to introduce new American music. A girl I knew in Austria wouldn’t let me play her Jane’s Addiction because she knew it would suck. “Brit pop is now the best, and America hasn’t made good music since the 70’s.” For the record, she loved Blur but loathed Oasis.
I’ve had religious students, not only Christians, tell me they couldn’t be expected to consider certain arguments because they came from sources they didn’t believe in, like biologists and philosophers. They’d have to change their beliefs to do it.
This fear of identity shift presents very serious challenges to educators, especially now that so few people read actively and so many gather information from echo chambers. When what you know and believe equals who you are, a person will naturally fight challenge. And higher education naturally challenges our assumptions.
I told Tony what I wish our culture could tell its youth. It’s true that education causes us to cast a lot away. But if we concentrate on what community we’re losing, we won’t see what society we might gain. It’s true we must, no matter our culture, “leave the barrio” to question it’s value. Yet the whole point of questioning value is to be able to test, perhaps for the first time, if what we value is what we actually have or if we’re just telling ourselves a convenient little story.
Education shifts identity. As we live and age, identity shifts are inevitable. But we tiptoe around this obvious reality when teaching our youth. Telling them outright would require shifting our entire culture, and we fear this terribly because we can’t imagine ourselves being anything other than what we imagine ourselves to be.
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True Community runs each Wednesday. Gint Aras explores his experiences as an instructor in a community college that serves a lower-middle to lower class district in Chicagoland.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
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Previous True Community articles:
The Young Man With No Guests At Commencement
I Had To Kill A Guy At Work Yesterday
Top 3 Education Myths and How They Affect Men
Wonderful and absolutely right!!! After years of self-centered, biased thought, I have decided that I will not tolerate any more unfounded thoughts or ideas. It is a pain in the butt to be a critical thinker! You have to go in and do your research, identify the assumptions within the sources you read, as well as those within your own own thoughts, question your ideas and perspectives without exception. Critical thinking is frickin time consuming, but it is time well spent to engage in the highest level of contemplation possible. As a developing critical thinker, I thank you for this… Read more »
Is the phrase “identity shift” a euphemism for “assimilation”? Is this article a veiled attack on multiculturalism and its emphasis on maintaining ethnic identity?
Gint, before I go into my rant, I have to say that as an author for GMP, you’re one of the reasons I haven’t completely written off GMP. That being said … great article and it has a lot of value. When I tell people where I grew up and the HS I attended (going so far as to show them my old year book), they look at me with questioning eyes. As a white family, our living in that neighborhood took us out of a comfort zone and I’m not talking about comfort as in “safety” but instead breaking… Read more »
Tom, thanks for your comment, observation and compliment. You’re describing something Lithuanian refugees shared with Mexicans. In my experience in Austria, I was often told, by other teachers and artists, that Austrians often thought of themselves as “barely existing”. This was due to their size, proximity to Germany, and the baggage of their history: they were once the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they had the Hapsburgs. Vienna was once the perceived center of the perceived world. Now they were a state where a person could live a great life, but traditions were quickly disintegrating, and people clung to them, often desperately,… Read more »
I grew up in a barrio and felt the effects of its hold first hand. The difference between myself and my siblings, cousins, and peers who came from a similar background but did not “escape” it is that I have always had a highly fluid and grand self-identity. I do not like to feel boxed in or labeled. I instinctively rebel against any limitations imposed upon me. The pursuit of excellence forced me to leave behind any beliefs or values to which others clinged. I have always preferred an uncomfortable truth to a comfortable lie.
Gint.
You wouldn’t think the Austrian girl had any jingoistic dog in the issue between Brit and American pop. Unless she’d publicly identified as the town’s most active defender of the Brits, she had nothing public to lose. Not family, not culture, not livelihood.
This is unlike the barrio examples.
Problem is, if Tony starts readinjg, say, Instapundit or Ace of Spades, he might find an identity….
There’s a strong identity-as-opposite in central and Eastern Europe. You’re as much “something” as you are “in opposition” to something. I was told that America had no culture most often by people who sensed that theirs was lacking something. Those people already felt the loss and this gambit was a response thereto. As one student told me: “You don’t know what it’s like to be the birthplace of one of history’s most evil people.”
All that aside, point taken.