Finn: Literacy With an Attitude - Reflection

This piece really captured the distress I have been feeling since starting my journey in education. Like many people who grow up in a middle class area in this country, I was, for a long time, under the impression that most schools (at least public schools) had access to similar resources. Finn describes similar experiences to those that I have had since beginning my education at RIC. This post may be a bit less formal than my others as I feel it's an appropriate tone for the subject matter. My point in relating my experiences here is to illustrate how the separation of social classes in schools has a profound effect on our understanding of the world. 

  I attended highschool at one of the top public schools in our state and had what I had thought was top teir education at the time. We were allowed to pick our classes after freshman year and could specialize in a field, we had agriculture facilities, science labs, art studios, a digital music lab, a car mechanic track, even a couple 3d printers. By all accounts, my school was much better off than other public institutions in the state. From there I attended the community college and found it to be quite similar, though with a much more diverse student base. The community college offered me my first look through the eyes of people who grew up in vastly different environments than I did. I connected with people of color for the first time, as my highschool was very predominantly white, and was exposed very rapidly to a wide range of information that I had not had access to previously. I distinctly recall a conversation with my classmates in which they told me about all of the stereotypes and creative slurs they had been called in their lives and how Absolutely Baffled they were to learn that I had never even heard any of them. During my time at the community college I interacted with people from all walks of life, immigrant students learning english for the first time, students from affluent families, LGBTQIA+ students, middle aged students getting their first degree after years of working for minimum wage, students of all ages coming to get the GED, and all of them ready to learn. My time at the community college showed me what non-segregated education can be like, it showed me that when you are simply around people who have different life experiences you learn more about everything. If we could integrate the social classes to be educated together there wouldn't be so many gaps in understanding. When I transferred to RIC I found it to be a bit disappointing in this area. There is so much less diversity and so much more focus on surface level interaction. 

 

 Since starting my journey to be an educator, I have toured nine different schools in our state, from poor inner cities schools to montessori to private schools. From my time in this class working in a low income school, I have had my entire world view shifted. The teachers don't answer questions, the students never leave the classroom unless its for the bathroom and they don't have art classes. The paint on the walls is peeling, the tiles on the floor are coming up, doors often cannot shut all the way. The students are rowdy and disrespectful, fighting against what seem like nonsensical rules because they have never been told why the rules are important. My experience in this school has been very similar to that of the schools described in Finn's piece. 

 

 In contrast, during my first semester here I spent a day at the Wheeler school and also had my entire world view altered. Private schools are insane. I came home from that visit and raged to my friends about how grimy the visit made me feel. Not because the school was in any way bad, in fact, it's one of the most incredible learning institutes Ive ever seen; state of the art technology, Virtual Reality headsets for various uses, an art gallery that hosts international artists and talks, catered food for lunches, endless scientific resources and labs, and an entire building dedicated to the arts. It is an absolute dream of an educational facility. What I felt after the visit was a heavy and violent rush of injustice at the decadence of the school. That if these students, clad in designer clothes and Chanel backpacks, were in the public school systems instead then the $58,000 a year that they spend in tuition could benefit so many more people that just the elite. If their parents had to invest in public education in order to ensure that they got a good education, our education system would be so much better than it is.

 

 In conclusion, reading this piece gives a good insight into the ways that education works in different social classes, but I feel it is even more important to understand the value of breaking through those gaps of understanding.