society

Why School Matters: The Importance of Education Today

/ Rebecca J. Whitman / 1 Comment

Let’s talk about why school matters (or if it does at all). This is something that I never used to question. In fact, it is something that students in general never questioned till recently. According to a recent survey, over 40% of high school students consider themselves disengaged now. I really blame Covid for that because everyone seemed to come back with an apathy for education and others like they just don’t care or want to care about anything beyond themselves. I’m not alone in this assessment either. A lot of research is showing that there has been a shift in students since Covid that is resulting in lower performance in schools. In short, kids don’t see why they should care anymore.

I think the best answer for why school matters is to imagine a world where school doesn’t exist at all. What would happen to our knowledge then? Would we read? Do our own math? Do any experiments? If so, how would we know what to do? I think the point of K-12 is that it is the foundation of everything else you will ever learn in life. You can’t read without the foundation of first learning how to read and why it is important. You can’t argue without someone teaching you how to articulate a good argument. You can’t make change in a restaurant without someone teaching you the basics of adding and subtraction.

All life boils down to what we know and how we apply it. Knowledge is power and creates true haves and have nots when people ignore or devalue it. We teach the past and a lot of things that are not happening now because those who do not know their past are doomed to repeat it. In literature, we teach the past because all other writing today builds upon the knowledge of the greats that went before us; we want to keep people knowing the foundations of what made us today. Some of my first poems were written in response to something Lord Byron said that angered me. I can’t imagine a world that doesn’t know or care about Byron or Shakespeare or any of the rest. 

There may be a lot of problems–and even some redundancy–in K-12 education today, but we still need it. K-12 education is all about teaching you how to be a human, how to know what the rest of us know, and how to contribute to society. Education gets more specific from here, but that base foundation is everything we all stand equally on. Without it, how can we hope to be a civilized society at all?

The Language of Oppression

/ Rebecca J. Whitman / 2 Comments

The language of oppression hides

in bitterness and hate, cowers

beneath tables and folds

of a woman’s skirts, lowers

its head and hands

to the feeding trough, surrenders

its body while its insides

scream defiance and resistance

The language of oppression chokes

out Truth, stifles

what really happened

to our mixed race

American

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. I’m wrapped up in poetry and editing books where I am taking the last classes of my master’s degree in English. After reading a lot of Native American poets like Layli Long Soldier, I was moved to respond to the way so many Americans are stuck looking backwards. Even though their narratives are stories happening right now, they are influenced by a perception that some Americans are victims who are owed something by other Americans who were oppressors. There is something wrong with that.

On this blog, I shared a very personal poem from my own struggles with identity and heritage. That poem went on to be published by Sylvia Magazine.

No one would imagine I would have such issues, though, because I am as white as white can be. In our culture, white is synonymous with oppression. In the South, I am particularly aware of the hateful stares of my “minority” neighbors. Everyone assumes that I have had an easier life because I am white and that my ancestors owned their ancestors. If they asked, I’d tell them the truth: my ancestors lived in tiny rooms with newspaper walls on land they did not own. They worked alongside former slaves; they didn’t own any slaves of their own.

Racial identity is a complicated thing in America. We want to claim a strand of our DNA like we are pure bred of that nationality. The truth is that we are all mixed. If it were not so, we would not have survived in this brutal, foreign land. For love or survival, we formed alliances with other cultures and mixed our blood with our neighbors.

I can look back on that and say my poor ancestors were taken advantage of by an oppressive majority race, or I can look back on that truth and say my ancestors made sacrifices to afford a better quality of life for their offspring. I believe both are true, but which one perpetuates peace and harmony in society today?

We can’t change the past. At some point, we have to make peace with what happened to our ancestors and be thankful for the sacrifices that were made to provide a chance for a new life for all of us. The American melting pot is not easy or beautiful to all groups of people, yet we all are that pot. We need to realize that it says more for our resilience and determination that we are still here despite all the atrocities of the past than it does to point fingers at others and claim we are better than them because we were victims. In every family tree, there are both victims and victimizers. Instead of more protests, insincere apologies, and tax-paid handouts, we should embrace our own life story and make the most of the days we are given.

Looking back on history is not where we find our identity; it is where we learn how to do better in our own lives. True identity can only be found in Christ.