September,
2014 was the 25th anniversary of the publication of a book of mine
titled Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles of Achievement of America’s
Educationally Underprepared. Some of the readers of this blog are familiar
with it. Lives on the Boundary is by far the most personal of my books,
for the first third or so is the story of my own childhood hardship and
less-than-stellar time in school. In my last year of high school, I was
fortunate beyond belief to land in the class of a young English teacher named
Jack McFarland. He turned my life around and directed me toward college.
In
the balance of the book, I go on to tell the stories of academically underprepared
students I would later teach, from elementary school children, to incoming
college freshmen, to returning Vietnam veterans and other adults in preparatory
or remedial education programs. So Lives on the Boundary is a coming of
age book, a teacher’s tale, and a collection of stories of students who are not
doing well in school but, in a number of cases, do become academically
successful. The stories have a purpose beyond their particular events and
characters: to question educational practices that don’t serve underprepared
students well, and, more broadly, to explore the complex relation between
education and social class in our country. Many of the students I write about,
myself included, come from poor and working-class backgrounds. Nothing predicts
achievement in American schools as strongly as parental income.
The
book has had a very fortunate publication history, and sections of it have been
widely anthologized, especially a chapter titled “I Just Wanna Be Average,”
which portrays my high school woes and my fortuitous encounter with Mr.
McFarland in Senior English. In some ways, the success of the book is puzzling.
It was summarily turned down by 12 publishers in a row, for it is, after all,
an account of one person’s educational journey, hardly the stuff of a
best-seller. (In today’s market, it most likely would not get published at
all.) Other potential liabilities: The vocabulary and syntax are not simple—I’m
a big fan of the embedded clause. The book is peppered with references to
cultural events and artifacts of my youth and early adulthood and to the books
and ideas being introduced to me. Finally, though it is driven by stories,
those stories are woven into an argument about social class and educational
inequality. As a read, it is not a day at the beach.
Yet,
from its publication in 1989 to the present, I have been getting letters and,
now, emails about it—or about “I Just Wanna Be Average”—from a wide range of
readers: immigrant university students from North Africa and the Middle East,
older folks who send reflections of their own hard times in school, people from
well-to-do families who were placed in special education courses. A good deal
of the correspondence comes from first-generation college students, students
who, not without conflict, are trying to find their way in higher education. A
number of these first-generation students are in remedial English classes,
demonstrating a point I make in Lives on the Boundary: If a reading has
meaning to students, they will rise to the occasion, regardless of the text’s
difficulty.
My
world and experience was, in many ways, quite different from an Egyptian Muslim
woman in her early twenties or an African American or Latino guy in a Chicago
community college, but something apparently clicks, and for a long while I’ve
been thinking about what the source of that click might be. Some things are
obvious: the feelings of academic displacement and inadequacy, the struggle to
make sense of school. But I’ve come to think there’s something else as well,
and I tried to articulate it for a new afterword I wrote for the book in 2005.
Based on what
readers tell me, I think that Lives on the Boundary makes particular and
palpable the feeling of struggling in school, or not getting it, of feeling out
of place, but conveys that welter of feeling within an overall narrative of
possibility. This possibility is actualized through one’s own perseverance and
wit, but also through certain kinds of instruction, through meaningful
relationships with adults, and though a particular set of beliefs about
learning and teaching. The book conveys the sense that a difficult life in
school is not unique to you, not odd or freakish, that there are reasons for
such a life, that though difficult, the difficulty is not necessarily of your
making. You are a legitimate member of this place, and your struggles and
successes are important. Your efforts and your mind are taken seriously. There
are, apparently, few accounts of education in popular or academic culture that
convey this message to the students who most need to hear it.
These observations
lead me to a related topic, and that is the way working-class people’s academic
lives are portrayed in our media. Some portrayals are fraught with stereotypes
and deficiency-laden assumptions about intelligence and motivation. But even
some of the best portrayals exhibit a problem of a different kind.
Right before
Christmas, 2012, there was a powerful story in the New York Times by welfare
reporter Jason DeParle, “For
Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall.” The story is built around
three young women who excelled at a low-performing high school in Texas and
then went off to college with big dreams. All three have had a very rough time
of it, and four years after high school, only one is close to getting a degree.
DeParle is a nuanced writer, and everything he uses the women’s stories to
illustrate is accurate: from widening economic inequality, to institutional
barriers, to the individual women’s lack of institutional savvy.
But reading
the story, I was struck by how many of these kinds of accounts we read about
poor people and school, stories of insurmountable obstacles and dashed dreams.
There is occasionally another kind of story, the polar opposite: the kid from
the South Bronx or South Central Los Angeles who is studying something like
robotics at Harvard. These are powerful narratives with a long history in our
society.
There are
other narratives involving poor people and school; unfortunately, they are
perceived by some editors as less dramatic, but they are hugely important. They
are stories of people who do make it, maybe not with great fanfare, but they
succeed. Not infrequently, they have benefitted from dedicated teachers and
mentors, or special programs, or more timely and targeted financial aid and
services. There are also stories of people who don’t complete a certificate or
degree, but who accomplished something valuable, like the young man I got to
know who turned his life away from drugs and the streets during the first year
of a welding program and after a lot of thought and consultation joined the
Navy to stabilize his life and finish his education.
If all we
read are stories of failure, we can come to think that little is possible for
students who start out behind the eight ball, that it doesn’t matter what the
institution does. We have to have stories like DeParle’s, absolutely, for they
slam home the devastation of inequality. And also give us the story of a young
person’s exceptional achievements—the rise from mean streets to a robotics lab.
I’ve told both kinds of stories. But give us as well the full range, the less dramatic,
but tremendously important testaments to our broad and varied intelligence as a
people and to the difference a responsive institution can make as people go to
college or return to it, seeking a better life. All of us need to read these
stories, but especially the students who are living them.
* See blog post
from June 12, 2014
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