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WHAT AN UNEXPECTED SOURCE TAUGHT ME ABOUT BLACK LEARNING MATTERS

12/19/2016

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I learned a lot from friends who responded to my op-ed piece BLACK LEARNING MATTERS in InsideHigherEd  for December 9, 2016. Thanks!  Bu maybe my most important lesson came indirectly from an unexpected source.
 
Many comments that I received were two edged. Clearly, there is a wide consensus that higher education is not doing a good enough job in providing educational opportunities for disadvantaged students.  But there is a counterbalancing feeling of discouragement. The most common objection to my piece has been that black students are really only interested in studies that will lead to high status or high paying jobs.  Sound familiar? 
 
Then Josh Ober at Stanford called my attention to something I had missed, what President Obama said about democracy, ancient and modern, during his visit to Athens in mid-November.  He had a lot to be discouraged about, too, but drew on the experience of ancient Greece (and modern scholarship, notably the work of Josh Ober) to make the case for democratic institutions. He spoke with clarity, intelligence, and – imagine!- coherent sentence structure, qualities we may not experience very often in the next four years.
 
So read President Obama’s  ‘remarks’ in Athens, and treasure them.  They set me dreaming again –  that every American student, whatever race or economic status, should read those words and the ancient texts that stand behind them  while sitting on the Acropolis, argue about them down in the Agora, and defend his or her own view on the Pnyx.
 
Obama wasn’t just defending democracy against rampant authoritarian nativism; he was modelling how the classical past can speak to all of us about the present and our ever more uncertain future.   That kind of learning matters, for all of us.  

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3 Comments
Al Duncan link
12/20/2016 07:25:59 am

A comparative perspective: I've witnessed similar discouraging and disparaging remarks about the perceived utilitarian focus of historically underrepresented students (i.e., of color) in South Africa. Yet these remarks almost always seem to be invoked to forestall corrective action or else justify low enrollments. Such criticisms should (also) be directed at the prevailing cultural narrative; it is treating the symptom to chastise those who have been promised economic and social rewards for following the STEM straight and narrow.

Seen from another perspective, enrollment gaps should be calls to us in the humanities to make changes or more proactively court these students with clear pathways to meaningful and civic, but also economically self-sustaining, lives.

Such remarks over utilitarian focus, even if well intentioned—truth be told, paternalistic—strike me as psychological projection. They are responses to broader anxieties over declining humanities enrollments from students of all stripes. As so often, we are more likely to "see" a problem afflicting all of us first/exclusively in minority communities.

I would be interested to see a wide (international?) study about how academic focus/major correlates to "race" vs. first-generation college students. I suspect many if not most students aren't even aware that degrees in Classics are offered. Fewer still are likely to know someone personally who has gotten a job or found other forms of fulfillment with such a degree. We shouldn't underestimate the challenges and obscurities facing all of our undergraduates in choosing their course of study. In the face of such uncertainty or volatility, one can hardly blame an individual for avoiding perceived risk.

I appreciate you calling attention back to Obama's visit, which feels like quite years ago in this politically busy December. It was surely as historical as his speech was historically informed—despite some strained demotic captationes benevolentiae! Nevertheless, I am depressed by the fact that we find ourselves turning to an "all lives/learning matter" closing salvo in our own rhetoric. Perhaps truths that were once self-evident are no longer...

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