The Responsibility of Re-Education
Today is the Solstice. In the Northern Hemisphere that means living through the darkest day of the entire year. Starting tomorrow, there will be more light and more light and more light.
That’s kind of how I feel about what I’m calling the “responsibility of re-education.” It’s dark – reckoning with the realities of what we learned (and didn’t learn) in our youth that we, as adults, have the responsibility to go learn, un-learn, or re-learn from the vantage point of deeper complexity and truth. More light.
This essay is not an indictment of teachers or curriculum. I have many teachers in my life, and they are each trying their damndest. This essay is about life after our formal schooling.
#lifelonglearner was trending a few years back. That phrase was in the zeitgeist for a bit. Seemingly to indicate that smart people commit to ongoing learning. Ok, cool. Learning what? From whom? Why?
As a white girl in public elementary school in the 1980s, I had classes in social studies, civics, and history. My teachers were white. My textbooks were filled with stories of white people, specifically white male “heroes” of one sort or another. And the AP offering my senior year of high school was in “European History” – as though that was the most important (or only) history worth learning.
This essay is about how each of us can choose to rise to the responsibility of re-education for ourselves, depending on our circumstance, our mixed identities, and what our lived experience did and did not afford us the opportunity to learn simply through our own experience.
There are days when I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what I do NOT know. I used to be worried I’d run out of time to “catch up.” But now, I just follow bunny trails of curiosity, gathering what I can.
When I went to college in the early 2000s it was still too early for the internet to be considered a legitimate source. We weren’t allowed to reference it in any of our collegiate term papers. Instead, we were paging through encyclopedias and attempting to navigate the hellscape that was inter library loans and an in-library copy machine that only took dimes. It’s funny looking back. But at the time, it was all that we knew.
In Alfonso and my book, Hiring Revolution,” we quote poet, playwright, and author, Dr. Maya Angelou on page 08.
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”
We referenced Dr. Angelou because she offers such a clear and concise call-to-action. Early on in our practice together, Alfonso said, “It can feel easy to be captured by the enormity of injustice.” No doubt. Incremental progress, one meaningful move forward at a time, is often a wise goal.
What is in our control now that we’re grown-ups is that we can decide our own curriculum. We can pick our own teachers. We can make the conscious choice to go learn what we feel like we don’t understand but we should.
Historically and contemporarily, what do you want to know about the reality of race and gender dynamics in America? In the workplace? In your life writ large?
Two of the skill sets I believe are valuable currently are:
How to find wise teachers, and
Learning how you learn
Who are your current teachers? Of whom are you an active student? How have you learned to vet sources and who you can trust given the barrage of content we each now have access to?
Are you a podcast listener? Reader? Documentary watcher? Instagram follower? Flashcard memorizer? Learn how you learn and rather than just being a passive recipient of fascinating info you can retain and then use what you learn in your life and work in real and meaningful ways.
Here are some of my teachers and what I have learned and am learning from them:
Nikole Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project the reality of the U.S. project of chattel slavery and its ongoing repercussions. You can check out Nikole in YouTube interviews, and listen to the award winning podcast anywhere you get your podcasts.
John Biewen, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Celeste Headlee and the Scene on Radio podcast the season’s entitled “Seeing White” and “MEN” changed my fundamental understanding of how racism and sexism got invented, imported, and infused into our lives and our cultures.
Ramy Youssef and his Hulu series, “Ramy” through Ramy’s stand up, interviews, writing, producing, and directing, he takes on topics of American exceptionalism, being a Muslim growing up in a post 9/11 world, and the ongoing attempts to dehumanize and distance ourselves from the Arab region and Arab peoples.
There are more teachers, of course, both living and dead that I continue to learn from and be changed by.
My wish for you, and for us as grown ass adults, is that we each commit, one nugget at a time, to our own re-education. We can do it. The teachers and information are out there. But know that it’s a choice. Our regions and our internet feeds are highly segregated. So, if we don’t go looking, we may not happen upon the teachers we need to have our next breakthroughs.
In my experience learning requires humility. I have gotten increasingly comfortable with self-identifying as a smart and capable person who mostly doesn’t know things. That dissonance no longer bothers me. I embrace it. I’m good at a few core things, the rest of it I’m still a novice. Still learning. Still a beginner.
So now, my cadence of interacting with the world around me often follows this flow:
I don’t know.
I go find out.
Now I know.
What do I want to do with this new knowing?
I believe in us! Feel free to reach out and share which teachers you are currently learning from.
My commitment to you, on this journey of 52 essays in 52 weeks, is that next week I’m going to finish and share an essay about the four generations simultaneously in the workforce.