Education does not guarantee economic stability, but it can be effective in enlightening individuals about the realities of humanity.
-C. Mendie
I made this quote when I was creating my personal essay for graduate school. I was thinking about why I was making the decision to continue pursuing institutional education. I thought about all the people I had seen being laid off from the positions that they had held for years and all of the recent college graduates, like myself, that lost their job opportunities. People were still feeling the effects of September 11th and I found solace in the thought that when I was in college, I loved to learn. That is not to say that I didn’t like to learn outside of school, but I was more motivated to learn about humanity and literary theory and also capable of researching these topics at the University.
I’ve seen poverty first hand and I know that it doesn’t skip the doors of the educated. I know that my situation is no more different than that of some of my heroes and heroines. Zora Neale Hurston died a pauper. Maya Angelou saw hard times. Political prisoners and the Black Liberation Army probably knew poverty more than anyone else. We all know about being strapped for cash, using “stamps”, getting free food from churches, eating school meals and carrying empty plastic bags to fill them up with boxes of milk. We know about not having heat and hot water and huddling around the oven for heat, boiling hot water to take a bath or just braving the ice water.
I know about rats, not mice, ths size of squirrels biting into bags of rice, flour, sugar, noodles, cornmeal, and anything left out that was soft enough to chew:
I know poverty
as winter welcomes us
with frostbites indoors.
cold floors called for
warm socks.
And we wear coats as we huddled around the oven.
I know poverty
as windows get sealed with plastic.
Not to be opened until spring
or maybe summer
when windows have to stay wide open
for cool air to get in.
And I know poverty
like: “Do you take Medicaid?” phrases
Cure colds with lemon and honey
…and HUNNNNNNNNNNNY…
no time to rest because the house needs to be clean
and we need to eat.
And I know poverty
like patching up clothes
and handing them down.
So we all try to stay the same weight
so our new clothes wont be baggy
or tight.
I know poverty
as they say education is the key.
But we’re here with no heat
and rats and rocahes raid
and rent still needs to be paid
and we can’t even get sick
cuz…
who can afford it?
and I know poverty when I see it
because, I too, have lived it.
And each and every day I walk into the classroom to teach 16 children in my special education class, I am torn between two different sets of thoughts, one of despair because the students do not care about education. Many of them cannot see themselves years from now doing something productive with their lives. They enter the classroom rambunctiously, refusing to be cooperative. And all of this happens between 8:40 and 9:00am. Already, we have wasted 20 minutes of a 45 minute English class. This is tragic for a set of kids that are reading at a level that is at elast 3 to 4 years less than it should be. And I long to have them love English and learning as much as I do but the other part of me thinks that maybe they are right for not caring. With the odds against them, are they wrong for not wanting to learn? If education cannot even guarantee that their economic positions will change, then what is the sense?
But it is my job to mold minds, and despite the fact that these kids cannot see a future, i have to make it possible for them to believe that education is worth it. And so I work, teaching a philosophy that I may not even accept for myself.
I don’t know if I will one day be so far removed from poverty that I will be preaching about how education guaranteed all of my wealth, but for now I live with the reality that less than 1% of the population is wealthy and education does not always guarantee economic stability but in learning, I still find pleasure in knowing that the human situation is not one that we must face individually, but it is one that collectively we share. I place my hope in the notion that even if education won’t help me live comfortably, it will open my mind and my heart to the realities of the human experience even outside of America.