I finished The Other Wes Moore last week and Lost in the Meritocracy this week, so I completed two books per two weeks with a focus on nonfiction books I chose with my grant. Feeling good about the selection of The Other Wes Moore, but I'm a little meh about Lost in the Meritocracy. Two left to read - Girl's Guide to Homelessness and I Am Malala are up next. From student reviews, I feel like I may have a mixed response again. Love getting feedback from all of you. Keep it up!
Big surprise here...I'm connecting the authors of my two recently finished books on the basis of their approaches to education. Wes, the author in The Other Wes Moore, has a decidedly difficult life in comparison with Walter Kirn from Lost in the Meritocracy. Growing up on the streets of Baltimore and later the Bronx, Moore is surrounded by kids who see violence as normal behavior, a way to survive in a brutal urban environment, and Moore gradually diverts his attention from school to gaining status on the streets. He discusses his mother's decision to send him to military school and says that she "felt [his] environment needed to change and [his] options needed to expand. Drastically" ( Moore 95). And she changed them. She found help from her parents and sent her son away from the urban streets that might have lured him to a world of drug dealing. That move to a military school saved Moore. Education became his salvation, and through reading, he discovered words that "helped [him] harmonize [his] understanding of America's history and [his] aspirations to serve in uniform" (131). He recognized in biographies and fiction people whose experiences showed the ceaseless efforts of African Americans to overcome low expectations, and the military provided him the structure and the opportunities to continue those efforts, helping him become a Rhodes scholar and an author who advocates for youth assistance programs. The "other" Wes, in the meantime, attends a job training program after completing his GED, but he discovers that he cannot survive on the paychecks he earns from the "honest" jobs he takes on, and he returns to a life of drug dealing. Education saved the author Wes Moore from the "other" Wes's fate.
While reading this tragic tale of two lives that began on similar paths only to diverge into drastically separate fates, I had a difficult time not getting completely frustrated with Lost in the Meritocracy by Walter Kirn. Kirn waltzes his way into Princeton by playing the achievement game. He nails his SAT scores, impresses teachers by mimicking what they say, and acquires hollow academic accolades that amount to little real learning. In the midst of his journey, he finds a way to blame his upbringing and the system for his lack of commitment rather than confronting his own tendency to "game" the system. In one potentially fateful moment, he is summoned by the Princeton honor committee and questioned about cheating on a Spanish test. Because he is frequently under the influence of drugs, and because he rarely addresses his tests with any sincere focus, he can't remember if he cheated, but he musters up his talent as a former debater to prove the case that without solid evidence that he did cheat (other than one eye witness), his crime is unprovable, and whether he cheated or not, he is "unconvictable." As he discusses the matter with the representative for the honor council, a typical Princeton student who apparently comes from wealth, Kirn wonders if they could have been friends had they met under different circumstances, but he discounts that possibility, noting that the other young man was "from a different tribe" (Kirn 109). For Kirn, his middle class background serves as his plague, the reason he cannot find joy in education; he asserts that "pure meritocracy can only promote; it can't legitimize" (171). Because Kirn is from the middle class "tribe," he reasons he can never get as far as his Princeton classmates, but that reasoning seems absurd in the light of having read Wes Moore's story. Moore didn't even have the luxury of a middle class life, and though his mother and grandparents were educated and employed, they were never able to give him the benefits Kirn had, but Moore chose not to dwell on his hardships. He embraced education as a way to overcome them, while Kirn views his opportunities AS his hardship.
The dichotomy makes me wonder. Does our system lure students into making education a game, or do kids simply have so much luxury and ease in life (middle class IS luxury in the grand scope of the world's economic levels) that they no longer see education as part of their success? Do they, in fact, view education as some false requirement or system of arbitrary authority? If that's the case, how can teachers change it fundamentally to make it about learning for internal satisfaction rather than to teach "job skills"? If the focus is only on how a particular class or GPA can get someone ahead in life, we are in fact negating what our real purpose should be, which is to foster an interest in learning to better the world, not just to better our personal circumstances.
After laboring over these ideas, wondering if I would sound "mean" in questioning educational apathy, Mr. Zuber posted his blog about competition in education, pointing out that "Instead of a system that teaches students and teachers the value of an overall education in which everyone helps each other reach their greatest potential, we put students in competition together for class rank, scholarships, admittance into the most prestigious colleges." And then he dove into the idea of competition between classes, competition for student time, for student attention, for student commitment, and his comments added another layer to my concerns. Are we (teachers) the problem that keeps kids from learning for themselves and not for rank? I hope not. I love what I do, and my best moments involve collaborating with colleagues and witnessing kids who reach new understanding by working together. Anything we can do to make that happen (we as in teachers AND students) will make us better as a school and a community. Here's a simple idea - what if we came to school to learn, to talk, to ponder, to argue, not just to earn points? It's a simple idea...for kids. Like this:
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