Education

https://auburnseminary.org/voices/naming-racism-in-high-school-one-muslims-story/

When I was younger, I loved learning. I was always reading books and was asking questions constantly. Because of this, my parents thought I would become an amazing student, and that I would love school. But each day I would come home from 2nd grade angry, saying that I didn’t learn anything. I remember hating the month-long unit we had on cursive and the pages and pages of show-your-work problems when I already knew the answer. It felt wrong, and every day after that I dreaded–and still dread–waking up and going to school every morning, forced to answer their questions and to learn nothing. In Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, education’s “façade of morality” is critiqued and called out, and he explores the unintended effects on children by the school system. 

Despite its core mission to teach and grow students, sometimes schools teach values that do not directly correlate with real life. Something that Mr. O’Connor pointed out in the beginning of the year was that students ask too few questions, only answering the ones given to them in the form of math problems and essay prompts. This should be flipped: schools should be ingraining the importance of asking questions because if a society isn’t constantly questioning the actions of others in higher places, that is how unjust laws are born and dictators rise to power. Tanehisi has similar critiques in his book. He asks: what does it mean to be educated in the eyes of the public school system? “Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory” (23). Here, Tanehisi claims that intelligent and educated mean two different things. If you are educated, you do as you are told, you are polite, and you don’t talk while the teacher is talking. Intelligence has nothing to do with this. The school’s mission is to raise a person that follows the rules. But the smartest people end up breaking the rules, and revolutionizing the world. Tanehisi has similar beliefs on the school system’s (modern society’s) prioritization on following the rules and other trivial social norms: What did it mean that number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the difference between life and death, were the curtains drawing down between the world and me? I could not retreat” (28). I think public schools, despite their best intentions, do not mold students to become the best they can be. I think schools should teach students to break the mold, to go against the current, to break down boundaries, and to ask more questions. 

Not only do American school systems prioritize good behavior over creativity, but they are also partly responsible for racism. In an article from auburnseminary.org, a former student, Hussein, recounts the racist atrocities he faced in high school. In one story, Hussein says that when he was applying for college, their counselor told all the students of color to settle for lower-level schools. And then, when the students of color surpassed and white kids, beating them to high level schools, the counselor’s actions were seen for what they were: racist. Unfortunately, the college counselor, and many others in Hussein’s stories, went unpunished. Ta-Nehisi Coates has also experienced racism similar to this. He says, “Education…has been and still is responsible for perpetuating injustice” (26). Tanehisi believes that the school systems have been, and still are, responsible for racism and injustice. In order to defeat racism, Hussein says, we need to be forceful with our punishments. We must be as strict as possible, or else nothing will come of it.