Never Take Education for Granted

By Cindy Reitzi
Madison substitute teacher

Students stifling yawns and complaining about exams, saying school is pointless, boring, and a waste of time hardly make education seem like the ennobling profession some teachers envisioned when they were young and flushed idealists.

In the past, depriving people of literacy and formal education was part of the larger violence done to whole groups of people in the world. Today, some women, lower class or caste individuals, and children who are conscripted into labor bondage are still barred from even an elementary school education because of who they are. They are the wrong gender, caste, race, or age. They are dangerous or inconvenient to educate. They are economically expendable.

They contrast sharply with most of our students who are legally guaranteed an education, however excellent or flawed that education might be. Yet in my brief conversations with students, sometimes historical perspective offers wisdom on the meaning of education by talking about its absence. And sometimes you meet a student who doesn’t take literacy for granted and who is so determined to get an education that it leaves an impression.

I met Marlon* in Basic History, one of those high school classes designed for students who can’t keep in up “regular” History because they don’t have the skills or choose not to do homework.
It became clear to me that Marlon was smart, judging from his answers in class and the fact that he was truly interested in history. He had an alert, interested expression on his face and he was really listening to a discussion led by a substitute teacher. This was remarkable in and of itself.

We were discussing the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in U.S. history. On the board, I had a chart and we were brainstorming what different groups in the South were going to need following the war. Discussion centered mostly on what former black slaves would need to start a new life.

Students mentioned jobs, housing, money, food, and land.

“What about education?” I asked. Silence. “Did you know that slaves couldn’t read and write? So when they’re free, they’re going to need to learn how to start a new life.”

“In fact,” I said, “it was a crime to teach slaves to read and write. It was against the law. You could be thrown in jail if you taught a black slave to read or write.” It was a restless class, but they settled down a little more.

“Reading and writing were such dangerous activities that slaves had to be prevented from learning how.”

While some of the students became a little thoughtful at the idea that reading and writing could be a crime, most had no remarkable reaction to the discussion. Marlon’s face, however, took on an intent expression, like he was having an epiphany. Since epiphanies happen so rarely, you recognize one when it’s happening. Marlon looked like he had been given a missing piece of information that put his own literacy in historical perspective and crystallized its importance. Like he suddenly knew why he needed to read and write and study history.

A couple of years later, Marlon was attending a different high school than when I first met him. I asked him why he switched. He said he felt he would get a better education at this school and transferred in.

“My girlfriend’s at the other school and she doesn’t like it, but my education is too important,” he explained.

In my experience, not many high school boys would tear themselves away from their girlfriends because they value their education so highly.

Those who feel an ache of ignorance because they lack formal education or they’ve had to fight hard for it know the meaning of an education better than those who take it for granted. Likewise, groups that are silenced can better appreciate the rights we simply assume.

In another history class, I had finished describing the suppression of women’s free speech during the French Revolution. I decided to add a related historical axiom.

“When you’re studying history,” I told students, “at any given point in history or in any society, pay attention to whom the government or the powerful want to shut up. These are the people they’re afraid of.”

Prohibition of literacy, free speech, or other “inalienable rights” takes on a life of its own. Institutional discrimination becomes a form of “tradition”: things have always been this way and are, therefore, the natural order of things. Still, there have always been groups and individuals who have gazed farther outside the lens of “tradition” to change the rules of access to the rights and codes of power.

Students today are part of a critical mass of individuals representing flawed but growing assumed access. So when I see students who yawn today, it is with the wry knowledge that someone in the past has pried open a door for them to sleepily miss one educational opportunity.

* Not his real name