Me: 550 Days Ago, or: Some Thoughts on Education

by Lucy S.

On October 19, 2011, a little over a month into my first semester of graduate school, I emailed a friend with an idea. I have remembered this email and gone back to look at it sometimes, trying to remember the bulk of the ideas and feelings underneath (I imagine what I sent as that tip of the iceberg).  Am I still this person?  I’m less than a month from graduation now. Here is most of that letter:

 I've been working on this email for a week here and there; I know it's long, so please remember, there's no rush for you to read it or respond.  I just hope this doesn't sound crazy, like delusions of grandeur...

I've been reading and researching books on adult learners for more than a year, and I never find anything by an actual adult learner, written most of all for an audience of other (actual or potential) adult students, and secondly, for educators so they might actually hear from some of those they seek to educate.  You know what I mean by adult student: non-traditional student, some say over 25 and/or a parent, especially those working at the undergrad or remedial level. I want to try writing this, and write it not only from an "I' but also a "we" perspective, bringing in voices of other adult students from different backgrounds and in a variety of life situations. I know I don't even have an MA let alone a PhD to be qualified, but I think it would be valuable to write it while I'm still doing this and while my undergrad experience is fresh. The point is to write something experiential, to be 'with' the adult student reader in a sense... (bell hooks wrote Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism when she was still an undergrad...)

I could try to rework some of my honors thesis where it fits, but I also think I could in some ways write better about my experience at [my undergraduate university], at community college [years before that], and now in this program, because I've grown somehow, even when I didn't realize it.  I think my writing and more importantly my thinking is better, and I'm not as overwhelmed with certain kinds of emotions (like self-pity) about it. But I'm still in it, and close enough to undergrad to remember well and not change it into something that isn't true. 

I can't and don't want to write a college of education or sociology type of book; I want one that tells stories but then weaves in theories, history, various pieces of knowledge where they contribute and fit.  So many adult learners feel so isolated and stressed in their educational experiences, and struggle with such overwhelming feelings that they should just give up, that it's too late, that they don't belong. I felt like that even in my 20s – felt that, as someone with kids, I didn't belong there and felt down on myself for being so 'behind' in my education. Then there were the years waiting and waiting to get back to it, which is in itself part of many adult learners' experience.  I think I can write about these things honestly without a 'poor me' sound that I know I have had at times. The 'we' perspective helps with that, too... knowing I'm writing with and  to people going through their own difficulties with these things.

Here is a powerfully poignant quote from bell hooks which deeply resonates with me - especially about being distanced from our pasts, and the overwhelming contradictions and tensions which are so hard to understand and bear well when you're in the thick of it. 

Throughout my graduate student years, I was told again and again that I lacked the proper decorum of a graduate student, that I did not understand my place.  Slowly I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality.

Students from nonprivileged backgrounds who did not want to forget often had nervous breakdowns. They could not bear the weight of all the contradictions they had to confront. They were crushed. More often than not they dropped out with no trace of their inner anguish recorded, no institutional record of the myriad ways their take on the world was assaulted by an elite of class and privilege. The records merely indicated that even after receiving financial aid and other support, these students simply could not make it, were not good enough. bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (36)

[….] Please, will you tell me what you really think about this?  I want you to be honest. You know I don't mean any of this presumptuously; I hope it doesn't sound like that …. I think it would really help me to write this, because I could maybe finally have something to contribute instead of just 'taking' education. I mean, I know I have my small scale stuff with my kids and people I know, but I want to make my experience have more meaning than just an individualist thing. This would never be some kind of simplistic "how I triumphed" story...  I believe if I managed to do it well, it could truly help adult students not feel as alone and confused about their experiences.  I could have used something like this. Instead, I found bits and pieces from writers in sometimes very different circumstances who I would be embarrassed to say I privately related to, because it would sound like I'm comparing my experience to theirs when theirs were much harder. But that helped me to feel an imagined solidarity.  And, well... you know the rest of how I got through those final three semesters…  

how I found some form of connection during times when I otherwise felt isolated and unreasonably terrified or anguished, or just wanted so much to talk about something that interested or moved me...literature, theories, etc.

Many adult students feel like no one really cares if they continue their education …. In particular, if the classes don't lead straight to a job with more money, and/or if a program goes on a long time, people they're close to may question the point, and they will wonder that themselves so many times …. There are financial pressures, tolls on relationships, internal agonies... I know these things aren't unique to me. 

In a couple of follow-up emails, I added:

I want this to somehow be literature, to have something poetic about it, and to admit that the contradictions we feel inside are akin to the enormous ones in our society... that there may not be a job waiting at the end of this like a pot of gold, that we have to figure out what it means in entirely different terms sometimes.  Or that even if there is a job at the end (as with someone going for a nursing degree) we live now, not in the future....

And:

I know the thing really is to write it rather than to talk about writing it.  And I am writing.  But if I don't tell anyone, I'm afraid it will never seem like a real work, that I won't at least try to do something more with it than just writing and holding it myself. That's part of why I'm telling you about it (and to hear any ideas of advice you might have). I think we have to somehow take our efforts seriously even when we don't know if we should - don't know if we can make them materialize. I hope this makes sense. 

***

 I was soon swallowed by the work of the semester, and then the next. By last summer, I was trying to write a statement of purpose to apply to PhD programs, a statement that should have taken a week, but that I could not find the right words for all summer. And I have to smile sadly now at my claim then that I was past all the worst of that ‘self-pity.’ The torrential emotions I have experienced since then have included plenty of self-pity tangled up with sympathy for others, anger, love, joy, despair… 

Maybe I lost faith in the idea of the book or my capacity to write it. Now I approach graduation with the master’s, confused about what comes next. My writing and my thinking are better than they were when I wrote that email, but I feel so emotionally and physically fragile. And is that the book to write? Who would even care about a book like that, a book that wasn’t a cheerleading list of how ‘you too’ can navigate college and emerge into a high-paying career?

I believe in the value of what I have worked at and created in these endeavors. I know that we have to believe in these efforts for their own sake. The dominant ideologies of this society teach us so early on that nothing is valuable and meaningful unless it gets us something else.  Or if it is, it is held completely aside from what we would consider important work, and it is thought of as a hobby or one’s ‘private life.’  This is a constructed mentality that has not always existed in humanity. It is a life-doctrine and life-practice with a bloody, voracious appetite, consuming us and everything around us, so that most everything must ultimately be transformed into profit.

Imagine if every time you cut off a piece of your home, inside or outside, you could get quite a sum of money for it, but also that you had to remain in that home for life. How many times would you end up chopping off just one more bit of it?  Imagine if you were paid ‘good money’ for donating pieces of your body – well, we don’t have to imagine this. It is happening (http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/living-cadavers-how-the-poor-are-tricked-into-selling-their-organs/254570/ . But what if you could keep getting money for each toe cut off, each finger? This has happened in the past in the U.S. when people had insurance policies that paid this way – people who were poor and desperate. And of course, people in the U.S. sell plasma all the time.

But what does it mean to instead sell most of our life away doing work that we don’t believe is even worthwhile? Don’t we have just this one life, as we might have just one house, and do have just one body? It is one thing to do work that we find unpleasant yet important. It is another to do work that in actuality should not even exist, work that in the larger scheme of things hurts us, other people, and some or all of the earth we live on (meaning the myriad of living entities that make up these ecosystems). What else but our economic system compels so many of us to do this? Isn’t this part of profit logic? Aren’t so many of us economically blackmailed into selling our never-to-return days away doing work we would not otherwise do?

But what if some entity would pay us every time we embraced someone we love? Or what if all small acts of friendship were somehow monetarily compensated? This is the ‘rewards’ or ‘carrot’ part of profit logic. Wouldn’t this in actuality be nightmarish?  How would we ever know when our or someone else’s loving acts were motivated by actual love and when they were motivated by monetary profit?  Is there anyone else who like me thinks (and hopes) that enough healthy rebellious life would surge through us that we’d find ways to subvert the system – maybe hold a hand where the camera (or whatever monitoring instrument) couldn’t ‘see’ to then compensate us? Slip someone a handwritten note? Kiss a baby’s forehead or hug someone behind a bush?

But this is what happens with education when it is always constructed as a means to an end. This idea is deeply ingrained in us, yet when I last lived in California and had managed to finally take a few community college classes again one semester, there were quite a few people in my American History One class who were just taking the class for the enjoyment of learning what they could there and being with other people who also were learning that history. It was only $11 per credit (or unit, as they call credits in California state colleges). So at $33 for the class, people could afford it without having to justify it as only a means to an end. It was not perfect. I remember standing outside after an exam, which took up the first half of our nighttime class, seeing through the large windows a student sobbing because the professor had held up her rubric to the scantron sheet and the student had not done well. The professor was bending toward the student, hand on her back, trying to comfort her. But it was better – better than if that student had instead paid more than $1,500 for the class (when you add up all the fees), which is what she would have paid at the public university where I finished my BA. But there, she might have had a graduate student teaching that class who had little experience teaching (or grading).

That too is profit logic. Even so many of our public institutions now try to maximize their profits by charging as much as they can and paying teachers as little as they can. Most of those graduate students teaching at universities will not, upon graduation, find tenured jobs they can count on.  Many will teach for low pay, sometimes teaching one or a few classes at one institution and another somewhere else. Many people teaching with master’s or PhDs under these conditions are living below the poverty line, collecting food stamps. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134119156459616.html .Make no mistake: there is plenty of work for these teachers, which is why they are running around teaching these classes for exploitative wages.  

Is this not in a sense chopping off pieces of our own house or body to let this logic keep being implemented?  What work will remain for us or those younger than us twenty years from now if we allow this to continue?  What kind of a society will we have? 

They have told us for over a hundred years now that we are ‘consumers’ more than anything else. That is not an identity to embrace. We are members of these places that we live in, bound to one another in a multitude of ways. What kind of world are we laboring to create? What values do we actually want to live? Do we want to foster a practice of competition against others or care for others and ourselves?

In this context, with all of this weighing on me intellectually and emotionally, I look back at who I was 550 days ago and wonder who I should or can become during the next 550 days of my life. I cannot decide whether to apply to PhD programs for next year under these conditions, or whether to try to teach at a community college (still knowing the conditions that my students would face and being subject to them as low-paid adjunct labor), or whether to try to create something else somehow, or how to not feel like moving out of this country or just laying down and dying if this cannibalization of ourselves is to be our future. I have to believe that most people do not understand what is happening, that if they really grasped the enormity of this, then for the love of themselves, their kids, other people’s kids, and every life around us, they would demand something completely opposite to what is being done. 

I agree with Paul Farmer's assessment that "the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world."  Maybe this seems grandiose to apply to literature studies, but if they don't matter, or if only some people get to experience them and focus on them, then we will always be corrupted by these exclusions, and everything will be undermined.  Every time people choose an ethics and practice of 'as long as I got mine' they corrupt themselves and they undermine everything. 

The bell hooks passage has stayed close to me all this time. I did not forget my past. I have refused to live in only an assimilated present. And somehow, though I felt close to it sometimes, I did not have a nervous breakdown. I bore the weight of all the contradictions I had to confront, even if I bore them tearfully at times. I was not crushed. I somehow managed to continue believing in the value of what I was doing and what we were doing. I was in it for the fight, really. I reached out to who I could and held onto those lifelines. 

Who will we all be individually and collectively 550 days from now, on October 23, 2014 or in each of the days between now and then?  I keep thinking about the famous Niemoller quote:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.