September 30, 2014 - 13:57
One of the things that I really learned from my placement at an up and coming alternative high school in north Philadelphia was the idea of how access to education is something far deeper than just the question of the kinds of resources a student may or may not have. I worked one-on-one with a student for the majority of my time there and one of the assignments was to write a letter to a faculty member introducing yourself, describing aspects of your life, along with listing things such as goals and aspirations for the upcoming year. The girl I was working with was stuck, and upon asking about her goals she responded almost immediately “but I have no goals.” This was shocking to me, not only as a fellow student but also as an instructor, to hear this bright young woman tell me she did not have a single goal. We talked for a little while, and she told me about her family and home life where gunshots and drugs were the norm, where people rarely made it through high school, and college was a mere fantasy something existing only in a movie or alternate universe. Her access to education was completely based upon the environment that she was raised, and the generations of family members who had little to no socio-economic mobility. She was never taught to aspire to something more, to go that extra mile, to reach for a life better than her mother’s, or her mother’s mother, and so on and so forth. It was not, for example, a lower class education that led to her apathy toward learning but rather the lack of experience in her home environment in terms of mobilizing oneself into attaining a higher education. I realized that institutions of class have a much greater bearing on access, much greater than most would imagine. And to undo that much history, to unravel the notions of what life looks like for this young student takes much more than thrusting a “better” education because if the student doesn’t know what to do with these resources, they are rendered futile.