Education in America

In last week's New Yorker, author Peter Hessler writes about how it was like moving back to the USA after living in China for a decade. He enjoyed again listening to Americans telling stories, whereas the Chinese never lingered on interesting details or took pleasure in narrating a good story, in general they avoided personal topics. Instead, Hessler noted, there is no “reliable” small talk in America, any discussion can turn out to be personal, even tragic. I remarked the same thing when I was attending course on poverty and social policy at Harvard. I was more interested in the interaction in the class and how students perceived the issues we were tackling than learning about American social policy programmes. Personal stories and anecdotes about their experiences were common when they were articulating their opinions or questioning the efficiency of country’s social policies. These were often stories that I would have been very surprised to hear in a classroom in Europe, stories that people would consider too intimate, or even shameful secrets, to share with forty other people. One girl didn’t hide that she was a teenage-mother that used to live on welfare (the most stigmatized thing you could think of in America), another girl told us about her growing up in family with substance abuse problems. Maybe they actually were proud of these stories: “Look at me, I was disadvantaged but I fought my way to Harvard!”

This discourse on working your way to the top is unfortunately not imaginable to all Americans. My friend’s American flatmate here told us (European audience) about his background during our late-night dinner. He grew up in Brooklyn where schools are of extremely bad quality and, while many people continue to state college afterwards, he was one of the very rare cases that had advanced to Harvard and MIT, the best universities in the USA. His success in climbing the social ladders was part of luck, good behaviour, and involved parents; some of his smarter classmates lacked especially the last ingredient and didn’t make it as far as he did. It is not just a matter of standing out as a potential Harvard candidate that actually can make you one. When he met other students from Brooklyn in Harvard, he knew that they studied in private schools in Manhattan.

We, as Europeans, were extremely curious about his experiences and the environment in his Brooklyn school. What shocked us the most was the presence of police in the school and the interventions by criminal justice system. He told us about a girl who had scribbled her name on the desk with a knife and was prosecuted of vandalism. At the age of 13 her future was partially determined, with a criminal record, she could never have federal funding for further education; any social mobility would be really difficult after this act of vandalism. Around the dinner table, we were thinking that maybe we wouldn’t have come this far if we had faced similar control at school, if our intellectual capacity had been neglected due to actions that are not that unusual for teenagers. Was the policeman thinking that he was deciding of her future, did he care? The restrictive environment, where the fear of violence increased the teachers’ authoritarian behaviour and possibly unnecessary police interventions made school yet another prison for children who often came from poorer or otherwise disadvantaged families.

The American dream didn’t sound like a possible future for these children. In fact, the upward mobility seems possible only for middle-class children who have the necessary resources and support to make the “good” decisions. I’m not saying that things would be so much better in Europe. If you are born in a Parisian banlieu you are most probably stuck there for the rest of your life. But I guess the examples we discussed showed the contradiction in the American culture where people believe in hard work and equality of opportunity. If you don’t succeed, if you end up living on welfare, it is your own fault, you’re lazy – and you are stigmatized. In contrast, in Europe, many believe that it’s structural problems, government’s bad policies or lack of initial resources that make people “fail” and live in poverty, blaming the individual is less common (while more and more used in right-wing rhetoric). Thinking of the Brooklyn school, I can’t help but wonder how these children could be empowered in a system where they are controlled and often treated as potential juvenile criminals, if their families can’t provide them any resources, how could they fight their way to better universities, even surviving through high school is impossible to so many of them (drop-out rate is around 50 per cent in Brooklyn according to our friend).