Academia's Connection to Solving Social issues
I used to find comfort in academics. Specifically, in its subtle separation from contemporary social issues. Exeter nestles in a comfortable corner of the world. It embodies the beautiful place in a life that strolls along to chirping birds, poetic autumns, and gentle pondering of life’s philosophical questions. This nearly romantic nature was part of what drew me here.
With its distinct flavors of a small town and picturesque intellectualism, Exeter has lived up to those expectations for me. Any patch of grass is a perfect place to run through some Biology concepts or read the assigned chapter of an English novel. I must thus guiltily admit that I continue to find some comfort in the escape of academia, especially when I begin thinking too hard about greater problems with the world, or my own future and all things flip to their scary side. Academics has often given me an excuse to forget everything else and focus on the paper in front of me—even when it itself is stressful, I don’t need to stress about anything else.
Ever the blockage to peaceful thinking, the critic in my head enjoys questioning this escape: shouldn’t the knowledge I gain in academics prepare me more to think clearly and calmly about issues that impact me and others, rather than offer a crawl-space where I can shut the door to the rest of the world? Should it be that while I begin to ponder who I am to the world and to myself—the fact of just beginning being itself a privilege of mine—the information I learn in class develops on its separate track?
This issue of connection to social issues applies in different shades to different classes. In science classes, it could be a question of how racism impacted/impacts our paradigm in scientific thinking. In English classes, it could instead be the nuance between considering socio-economic status in the setting of a novel and whether that transfers, in our heads, to understanding the impacts of socio-economic status today. Yet these missing connections in academia are what distinguishes an information dump from an education, where the information we learn is connected to the lives we live. No matter what subjects we are talking about, I contend that these connections are not often enough placed out in the open for discussion.
To make things more complicated, upon entering my first classes, I realized that these social issues are ever present in academics at Exeter, even if we don’t mention them very often. While Latin texts can be taught with booklets that focus on vocabulary and constructions, I can’t afford
to forget that much of classical studies stem from a system which placed supremacy on Western civilizations, reducing cultures like mine in the process. While our discussions in STEM are idyllic in their equations and practice problems, comments or glances in class which imply that, as a girl, I must be worse at science or the ways that I echo those doubts back to myself don’t disappear in the idealism. While our homework, when not thought about too carefully, is often isolated into the warm world of academia, my experience in learning is inseparably tangled with my identity. The paradox is that while what we learn is often separated from social issues, who we are when learning cannot be.
We are left with this: classrooms where important questions on how this knowledge came to be are left out, where the beliefs that frame our learning are kept out of frame, where thoughts are not spared enough for relevance of topics to our current world, but where the lasting impact of these things stay in the thoughts, gestures and words of ourselves, our classmates, our teachers, and the materials.
It is difficult to write where we can go from here. Perhaps I can begin with some things I know should be true for us, as learners, here: we must do the learning we hope to do. It is, after all, only through knowledge that we could make genuine and concrete betterments. Yet, the discussion then stops being straightforward.
If homework on most days takes up until midnight or more, how could I spare more hours thinking or researching on my own to develop these connections? How could I make sure my own research was going to be a good cross-section of relevant sources? Am I supposed to know how to achieve such a collection? And, assuming it is reasonable even, how are some of us to deal with additional stress resulting from analyzing the treatment that already causes us pain, to be continuously confronted?
If it isn’t a student’s time to spare nor their responsibility, how could teachers be asked to redo their syllabi when they’re already so busy? Or how is it even possible to fit everything we hope to learn into the set series of 10 or 11 weeks of classes that we have? Exeter is already at the forefront, in my opinion, of connecting academics with developing social responsibility and awareness—this doesn’t mean our systems are perfect, but does mean that we’ve already come very far compared to other high schools in the US or from just some decades ago. In addition, this is ignoring the guidance I have received from the teachers here, and the mentors that I’ve been incredibly lucky to meet. How might anyone develop an even more improved system of learning in a heartbeat? Everyone at Exeter is running through crammed schedules of their own, and, giving the benefit of the doubt, no teacher likely sits around happily thinking about how they’re not spending this time bettering the school’s education.
I only desperately ask, how could we get the education we hope to gain?
To provide a small direction in which we can go, I still come to a rocky conclusion about how to do better. This at least needs to be on our minds. We must remember this responsibility of an education. It is impossible to erase who I am, and thus impossible to erase how others will think of and comment on me, how systems will treat me now and in the future as I step further from school. In terms of academics, the best education I could hope for here should equip me with the ability to think about difficult issues while informed. The best education should grant me another way to make it truly better for others in future.
