An Ode to My Education

As I walked down that dimly-lit hall, stained from years of use and misuse, I knew that I knew everything. Within the six classrooms of my tiny high school I conquered all. And someone, somehow, allowed me to believe that was all true. Granted, my high school experience was a bit abnormal. I graduated with a class of twenty, many of whom I had started kindergarten with, from a K through 12 school. I moved twenty feet down the hall from junior high to high school. It was within the walls of this small school that I spent 13 years building up some false impression of what life was… what learning was – true/false quizzes over To Kill a Mockingbird, poorly facilitated group discussions that led to offensive name calling, dates of the Vietnam war with little to no explanation of social changes that came along with it. Then I left. And when I left, I left for good. As I entered the university, I saw for the first time what education could be, what learning could be, what social interactions could be – professors wanted me to constructively challenge my peers, literature had historical context, answers didn’t come in the form of a yes or a no.

At first I was confused. Then I was angry. Then I was sad. To have 13 years of your life diminished into mere nothingness comes swift and hard. Jaded, I delved into my life at UNL, and I never looked back… until now. Four and half years in the university system have taught me a lot. I owe much to my professors who taught me more about learning than just books and problems. Sure, some of my classes and professors have been solely bent on cramming as many facts into my head as possible. And, as I did for years in high school, I have continued to purge myself of such information as soon as the time came that I no longer needed it. But my college experience has been much more than that. My knowledge has been questioned, my mental abilities challenged, and my investment in my education confronted. Not only have I learned to doubt what I know, but also I have been taught to doubt what others know – to ask questions, to be skeptical, to be unwaveringly curious. When I think of my four years of disenfranchised high school education, I look at it in utter confusion, utter disgust. Why didn’t anyone tell me I was allowed to disagree with what I was being taught? Why didn’t anyone teach me to look deeper than the simple explanations and summaries presented by my teachers? Why did they leave so much out of my education? Mostly, it hurts. It hurts that many of the people I trusted during my adolescence didn’t see fit to give me or my peers the opportunity to flame the fire of inquiry. And it hurts to know they probably never considered it, never realized what they weren’t doing.

As educators, my high school teachers taught what they knew. Often, they did so well. However, their knowledge was limited to the two square miles of Falls City, Neb. Many of them had lived there their entire lives, disappearing for four or five years to experience “the world” before scurrying back to the haze of normalcy surrounding Falls City. They came back to what they knew. Living in a place like Falls City, living anywhere, a person comes to lives as a part of its culture. It affects the way they speak, dress and behave. It affects their values. My high school teachers were Falls City. It had created them, and they were now creating it – endless cogs in the machine of rural Nebraska. Then I entered school, and I too became a cog, the next step in the continuation of Falls City education. Much like taking a long look at myself in a mirror after years and years of disillusioned education, I must also take a look at the community I came from. That community shaped the school, education and young adults that came out of it. And with the good (moral values, a sense of belonging and value in your roots) came the bad (close-mindedness, a lack of societal context and arrogance.) High school education reflects the school’s community; and, in doing so, it prepares students for life within the strict confines of that particular community.

Coasting through my high school education, I learned everything that I would need to know living in Falls City, Neb. Do your best – years of straight A’s will pay off eventually… just not now, the football team is playing. Keep your head low if you disagree – suggesting that there may be flaws in the death penalty system will label you as a democrat, and that’s a dirty, dirty word in this town. Who you know is who you are – and “Honey, why don’t you run around with that Hullman boy? He seems nice” doesn’t allow you to really ignore the fact that he can be found in the luxury of a cornfield any weekend with 30 drunken friends and a Keystone Light in his hand. Yep, like the Keystone Light, my education went down smooth every time. Honestly, armed with this knowledge alone, I could spend the rest of my days in Falls City, blissfully ignorant of anything too far off of the county grid. Just think… I could be mayor. But then again, there could come a time where I needed to leave my fair town. Perhaps due to the economic struggles that seem to plague rural communities or perhaps due to the declining population brought on by the rural “brain drain” (don’t worry, we’ll get to that), I would have to leave. Who knows where I would go after Falls City? I would have to claw my way out of years and years worth of disgruntled lies that I told myself about where I was and what I knew. And then I’d end up some place where the names are unfamiliar, the customs are strange and the beliefs are downright scandalous. Perhaps in reality it would only be a short two hour drive to Lincoln or Omaha, but it might as well be a foreign country for how unprepared I would be.

I think perhaps what gets me most frustrated is how completely unprepared my high school education made me in my aspiration. It’s not so much about the information I didn’t learn in high school; instead, it’s about the fact that I wasn’t asked to learn. Not really. Not anything beyond the textbooks sitting on the etched desk in front of me. My greatest fear comes from realizing that this can’t be true for only me. How many students graduate from high school without learning how to learn? How many come to the same stark realization I did? And even more frightening, how many never realize? Never realize that those four years should not be their four best years. Never realize that there’s more to learning than just plot summaries and pop quizzes. Never realize that after you get into college, your ACT score is just another number that doesn’t mean much of anything. The system of high school curriculum used widely throughout the United States falls short on what it offers the nation’s youth. The teaching methods, which are continuously challenged and altered, still fail to prepare students for life outside of high school, whether that be within the job market, within society or within college. Where the high school education system fails its students, it fails itself. Year after year, schools send unsuspecting, diploma wielding teenagers into the world, the same students who are the future leaders of America. Yet, their mission is tainted by the early conditioning that they “have a voice” and the painful and baffling realization that they have no idea how to use it. They’ve been taught to have the same voice as their teachers, who have the same voice as everyone else, who all came together to form a community. This idea of community has so many positive aspects – togetherness, team building, family. However, somewhere along the line the importance of community starts to squelch individualism, creativity and, dare I say, a little anarchy. Without forming a strong and firm sense of self, how can one fully and actively contribute to a community in which he or she has any investment? By tailoring education to teach students how to live in a community, educators are doing those communities a disservice by not allowing them to grow and evolve in new ways.

Certainly the problems within the U.S. education system abound; and, without doubt, they have contributed to the problems I have encountered with my high school education. A lack of funding to many public schools throughout the nation leaves them few resources with which to build a curriculum. Tattered textbooks in hand, underprivileged students learn about Macbeth. While across town students sit at desks with personal computers and research the themes found in Shakespeare’s writings. Surely a disconnect in the quality of education occurs here, but not necessarily in the quantity. Still students are learning about Shakespeare, about his writings, about his themes. Regardless of the medium being used to educate these students, they continue to learn the basics. And later, “the school takes literature and makes it a matter of study and testing” (Purves, 8). What was Macbeth’s wife’s name? Who died in Macbeth? The questions, no doubt, will look the same as students mindlessly recite information they have stored in their memory banks just long enough to make it through the test. No, while funding my be a problem. It is not the problem.

The real problem rests not in curriculum, not in funding, not in location. The real problem with secondary education is educators who continuously sell their students short, underestimating their students’ abilities, imaginations, cognitive reasoning skills and yearning to learn. “The more serious problem therefore, is not the failure to teach some specific aspect of thinking, but the profound absence of thoughtfulness in classrooms” (Newmann, 110). Where is the process of inquiry? Where is the curiosity? My teachers said time and time again, “There are no stupid questions.” But, there were no questions period. My classmates and I wouldn’t have even thought to question our teacher. We had never been asked to. I have this strange, surreal feeling when I realize what I thought my education was when it was happening and to understand its reality now. My teachers allowed me to feel brilliant by understanding the simple concepts that they placed in front of me. They applauded me for doing everything they asked, but what else was I going to do? They “boxed [themselves] into this kind of teaching – where [they] want students to think for themselves and to get the right answer” (Applebee, 1). What these educators fail to account for are the countless problems and questions that cannot be answered with a yes or a no. Not everything is right or wrong. Heck, some questions don’t even have answers. But these types of questions, the ones that ask for deep, cognitive reasoning and discussion, seem to be conveniently absent from most high school classrooms. At least, they were from mine. My classrooms steered clear of anything that could have stirred us from our academic malaise.

In our static educational sphere, my classmates and I took information from one location and placed it in another. We were forklifts for the educational and community ideals set up by those who came before us. This type of learning “tends to reinforce attitudes and beliefs rather than to effect conversions.” (Purves, 10). And there we writhed, as students all over the nation must writhe, like drowning worms, incognizant of the cesspool of learning they have found themselves in. “What we learn is in large part a function of how we learn it” (Applebee, 6). We, as high school students, learn by being told; therefore, we learn what we are told. All the while, nothing else is asked of us. It has a numbing affect that is hard to notice until it starts to go away, like the tingling of an arm that you’ve been laying on for far too long.

I guess that’s probably why I’m most thankful that I left. Now I can feel all of the things I didn’t realize were happening to me. But now, I feel like I’ve been wronged too badly that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back. It would be too painful to watch the youth of the town go through the same incredible, delirious, ignorant moments I went through as a teenager. Helpless in my ability to make a change so great, with just one person so small. Perhaps I am a contributing factor to the “brain drain” of rural Nebraska. I wish that weren’t the case, but I fear it must be. “In just over two decades, more that 700 rural counties, from the Plains to the Texas Panhandle through to Appalachia, lost 10 percent or more of their population” (Carr). The brain drain theory states that rural communities are losing their brightest minds to larger cities because they convince their brightest minds that rural communities have nothing to offer them. I beg to differ. My small town drove me away after years and years of convincing me that it could give me everything. It drove me away with its lies. It drove me away, because it didn’t really want me or my abilities. It just wanted another cog, another mindless body in the machine of normalcy that is Falls City. It never wanted me to learn new and exciting ideas or theories. The brain drain theory will tell you that rural communities should send their students out into the world to bring back ideas that will allow the community to grow and thrive. And while all of that looks nice on paper, it’s a little too explosive when it reaches home. Just as a confused teenager struggles against change to keep the innocent tag games of childhood an adolescent reality, so do communities throughout the nation. While preaching growth and tolerance, they quietly take a passive role in their own evolution. Mimicking that sense of complacency, schools teach their students to fall in line with what they are taught. Think, but not too hard. Try, but only enough. Strive, but don’t do anything too radical, and maybe you too can be the mayor.

Works Cited

Applebee, Arthur N. Toward Thoughtful Curriculum: Fostering Discipline Based Conversation in the English Language Arts Classroom. Rep. 1994. ERIC document reproduction service no. EJ480971. Print.

Carr, Patrick J., and Maria J. Kefalas. "The Rural Brain Drain." The Chronicle of Higher Education [Washington D.C] 21 Sept. 2009. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 21 Sept. 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2009.

Newmann, Fred M. "Chapter 6: The Prospect of Classroom Thoughtfulness in High School Social Studies." Teaching Thinking: And Agenda for the 21st Century. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., 1992. 105-32. Print.

Purves, Alan. (1991). "The Ideology of Canons and Cultural Concerns in the Literature Curriculum." Washington D.C.: Report for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.