Horizon

Don't Go Getting Above Your Raising

This doesn't exactly tie into anything we've been discussing below, but I thought folks here might be interested in these observations by "The Internet Monk", which have been making the rounds over the last few weeks:

We were recently discussing awards for some of our students. We were talking about some of our local students when our senior faculty member–with 40 years of service at OBI–mentioned that no local high school boy will ever take home a book from school. This seemed ridiculous, until I began thinking of the local students I knew and had known in the past. Slowly, it dawned on me that he was correct. I could not recall any male high school student from the local area ever taking home a book.

Scarcely had this sunk in when he followed up with another shocker: Many of the local men who had attended our school until recently would drop out in the middle of their senior years. No matter how long they had attended, what grades they made or how important they told you it was to graduate, they would drop out their senior years. He named the fathers of some of our local students who had done exactly that: dropped out just before graduation, not because of illness or tragedy, but simply because the stigma against being educated was so strong in the mountains.

These students didn’t want to appear that they were trying to be “better than” their parents or grandparents. They did not want to appear to be “putting forward” their “book learnin’” over their parents or grandparents. No matter what they heard from us–us being teachers and adults–they were able to go no farther than their culture said was permissible.

He continues to analyze this in the context of culture and personal identity. Very much worth reading.

Posted by Ben Brumfield at June 21, 2006 12:50 PM