A run in with a former student who believes schools fail youth.
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The most dangerous word in education is success. I know some readers will be shocked: shouldn’t the whole purpose of education be a student’s success?
I want to tell a story about a former student I ran into while waiting for a flight; it was a “small world” experience at an airport several thousand miles from our community college, with a student I had not seen in almost ten years.
I’ll call him Louis. As a student, he could have been a clichéd case study of “all the things wrong with young men in education”. Louis had problems paying attention. He mistrusted authority, claimed to hate reading, spent most of his time in the student lounge with idiots, and whatever work he turned in was cynical and haggard. It was textbook self-sabotage.
I was a very green instructor, not yet tenured, barely two years removed from graduate school. As a student at Columbia University, I had been surrounded by some of the most brilliant people I would ever meet; many of my classmates would go on to sign huge publishing contracts and win prestigious writing awards. It was culture shock to come from an environment of highly motivated people to one where a student like Louis could say during a discussion that The Diary of A Girl wasn’t worth reading because “…who cares about some spoiled bitch’s personal problems.”
I used to hate you. I couldn’t stand you. |
As is typical for students of his profile, he mellowed when speaking one-on-one. During office hours, I asked why he wanted to take college classes.
His answer was, while not really typical, rather common. Louis said he wanted to be successful. I asked him what that meant. He said he wouldn’t have to answer to anyone, could do what he wanted however he chose.
“Congrats, Louis,” I told him. “You’re already successful.”
♦◊♦
Success is a dangerous word because both educators and students take its meaning for granted. Success is a relative construct identical to beauty or, for that matter, failure. It’s difficult to achieve a goal if you don’t know what it is, and a delusional or misunderstood goal could set you down a troublesome path. Most of the students I teach do not set goals but accept ones set for them. They are often completely arbitrary or poorly defined:
Go to college.
Get a degree.
Get a job.
Get rich.
I often ask my students to explain what wealth is. Their responses vary, but they usually link wealth to some kind of sentimental image of the “rich guy”. On occasion there will be a student who has worked as a bank teller. “You can’t tell who’s rich by looking. The person with over $200,000 in savings might dress like a slob, and the one with lots of jewelry can be overdrawn.”
When you begin a conversation about concepts like net worth or debt-to-income ratio, students begin thinking very differently about wealth. Some do the calculations and realize that if they double their salaries and move to a more expensive neighborhood, they’ll still have the same amount of cash at the end of the month. Others conclude this doesn’t matter. The better neighborhood should equal a better life for their children with better opportunities and a greater sense of safety. On occasion, some student will ask, “Why don’t all neighborhoods have the same opportunity?”
Others, perhaps a majority, see the desire for wealth as categorically malevolent. Yes, they want to “raise their salaries”, but they won’t admit to wanting “wealth”. When they describe wealthy people, they’ll imagine someone akin to a king, royals who don’t answer to anyone and do what they want however they choose, facing no consequences.
♦◊♦
In the busy concourse of the airport, I found a place to pass the few hours between flights. I recognized Louis before he recognized me. He came up to my table in the airport café and said, “You were my teacher in the community college.”
“Hell of a place to meet, eh?”
I accepted his offer to buy me a drink.
“Oh, man,” he started, thanking the waitress for bringing us beer, “I used to hate you. I couldn’t stand you. I dropped your class out of anger. But then after I dropped out of that college, I couldn’t forget one thing you said in class. ‘Is it wrong to be rich? Are rich people all bad? What makes us feel that way?’ I thought about it a lot.
“Then I got in a bad situation. I had to get a job, any job, so this landlord hired me, a guy who owned apartment buildings all over the place. I fixed stuff for him. You can’t know who’s rich just by looking at them? Well that was this guy. He dressed like shit but was a total millionaire.
“The thing about him, he was always busy. He always had somewhere to be, somebody to hire, something to buy, something to sell, loads of stress. He taught me how to buy my first house, like a three flat where the house pays you to live in it. So I pretty much started my own business. Right now I have three rentals.
“You’re a teacher. How come classes never make us think about the future? How come teachers and schools are only worried about making you believe all these cute little clichés? It’s a joke. The future doesn’t have to be terrifying. You can teach somebody something real that helps.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like how to buy a house that pays you to live there. Or how many different kinds of success stories there are.”
“You don’t think school teaches that?”
“No,” said Louis. “School doesn’t teach you how to live. It just teaches you how to be in school. It’s like they’re scared if they teach you how to live, you’ll leave. So all the time they’re teaching you how to stay in school, preparing you for the next class instead of the next part of life.”
“Maybe they’re just successful businesses,” I said. “Maybe they’re like cell phone companies or credit cards, selling you a habit, keeping you trapped in it.”
This didn’t sit well with Louis. “Business?” He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have to trap someone to be successful. People should come back to you because you’re fair and have something valuable to offer.”
Photo by Epsos.
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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.
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
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