Our Inequality

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

When I sent the prompt for this article, "social and economic inequality," to our database of regular contributors and invited them to inform me of their interest in writing on it, I received enthusiastic proposals from three of our best writers right away. Rather than choose one author, we decided to produce a broad-reaching composite piece featuring thoughts from each of them.

You can find each author's bio and photo at the end of their respective sections. Click on them to browse other articles they have written for The Examined Life.

In the following, Rebecca Card Hyatt writes about economic and social inequality in her classroom, Naomi Geier writes about economic and social inequality in a globalized world, and Lindsay Marshall writes about economic and social inequality in our nation. 

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY: IN MY CLASSROOM

by Rebecca Card Hyatt

I have a student, whom I'll call John. John is seventeen years old. He’s in my senior honors English class.  He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and moved to Highland Park in junior high.  A little over a year ago he walked into the college counselor’s office at Franklin High School.  He’d heard the counselor’s schpiel about college the prior day, and it had been nagging him since then.  He hadn’t the beginning of an idea about what college was or how to get there.  But, he thought maybe he wanted more than just graduating.  The counselor took one look at his transcripts filled with D’s, and said, without further conversation: “You’re not cut out for college.  If you really want to, maybe think about a community college, if that …?” 

If Luis had lived a zip code or two over, and attended South Pasadena High School, this would have been a different conversation.  Besides the fact that his school would have had a half a dozen academic counselors as opposed to one, no counselor would have insinuated that his prospects, especially as a student showing initiative, were hopeless. 

For the purposes of this article, I’m not concerned with either the above-average students, or those who are far below average or simply don’t care.  It’s the average students who suffer the brunt of our social inequalities.  In Orange Country the average student goes to college; in LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District), the average student barely graduates.  These students have the same basic abilities, so why the difference?

This is what inequality looks like.  Through no fault of their own, my students are up against this and a long list of other socio-economic hurdles. 

- Charlie lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his family of 8.

- Jennifer’s mother isn’t literate in any language.

- Chris has never owned a book.

- Victoria has missed several weeks of school to care for siblings while both his parents are at work.

- Not one of my seniors’ parents has a college education

What’s more, LAUSD doesn’t begin to provide my students with the support to overcome these socio-economic obstacles, as these statistics merely hint at:

- The student to Academic Counselor is ratio is roughly 1000 : 1

- The percentage of students who graduate high school with UC/CSU eligibility is roughly 30%

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We can argue all the day long about what is needed to “fix” educational and social problems, but this doesn’t change the fact that thousands of students are stuck in a system that’s less than equal.  So, how do we, as educators, endure amidst this inequality?

Be content with helping specific students overcome specific obstacles.

Idealism kills endurance.  In order to endure on a day-to-day basis against huge odds, you must be humble.  You have the ability to teach a few students to read better and teach a few students enough math to score better on the SATs.  That’s it.  Being content with doing what you’re able prevents the burn-out that comes from trying to change the entire system in a semester.

Pray.

A wise teacher once told me that the burden of a student’s learning wasn’t mine to carry.  He was right.  Prayer reminds me that the redemption of broken people and systems is the work of God through His people.  At the end of the day I am completely incapable to make lasting change.  My hope is in the work on Christ.

If these inequalities are not true of your classroom, help your students not to take their unearned advantages for granted.

The fact that your students’ parents read to them is grace. The fact that they have college in view is grace.  Talk with your students about the inequalities of our world.  Remind your students that being on the upper ends of the socio-economic spectrum brings responsibilities as well as benefits. 

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John is unique … and lucky.  He took matters into his own hands, made up his bad classes in summer and night school, transferred to the smaller high school where I teach, and now stays after school to discuss with me the books he’s reading in his free-time.  Something ‘clicked’ in him at just the right time, and he’s been able to turn his life around and re-educate himself.  He’s in the middle of dozens of college applications.

He reminds me that endurance is a daily choice to work hard, despite the obstacles in your path.  He reminds me that, as educators, we teach because we love students, not because we want to fix the world.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY: IN AN INTERCONNECTED WORLD

by Naomi Geier

“And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, 'Which commandment is the most important of all?' Jesus answered, 'The most important is, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." The second is this: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There is no other commandment greater than these.'"  (Mark 12:28-31, ESV)

The attempt to live out the second of these commandments, appropriately cited by Christians the world over as one of Jesus' greatest teachings, requires an attempt to correctly answer two questions of great consequence. The first, "How do I love my neighbor as myself?", is perhaps the more obvious and certainly the one to which we tend to pay the most attention.  As Christians, however, we cannot in any way afford to neglect the second: "Who is my neighbor?"

One kind of answer to this question deals with proximity: neighbors are those who live within a certain geographical distance from you.  But distances are really very arbitrary (are you my neighbor if you live ten houses down the street?  What about twenty?  Or fifty?), and as such, the proximity answer really points to a deeper meaning of “neighbor”: someone whom you can directly influence or affect with your choices, and vice versa--hence the command to love your neighbors, which would be functionally impossible if you couldn’t serve them.  In short, if you can change a person’s life with an action you take or don’t take, then you’re neighbors.

Of course, for Christians who believe in the power of prayer, this definition already makes everyone a neighbor because we hold that prayer is efficacious even when there’s no direct physical contact, so we can and do pray for entire people-groups and individuals we’ll never meet.  However, the 20th century has also seen very special changes to the institution of neighbor-hood thanks to the phenomenon of globalization--we are increasingly interconnected in webs of choice and consequence all across the globe.  If the iPod you buy your spouse for Christmas, for example, is made with raw materials sourced from South Africa, manufactured and assembled in China, shipped through trade routes across half the planet (occasioning the consumption of fossil fuels as it goes), sold at an affordable price thanks in part to international trade agreements, and will eventually end by leaching toxic chemicals into a landfill somewhere in the developing world, where we outsource more and more of our garbage disposal, is there anyone along that complex chain of influences who cannot justly be called a neighbor?

“A globalized world,” in other words, is really just a fancy synonym for “one big neighborhood.”  And we can love our neighbors—or not—with every vote we cast, and every dollar we spend, and virtually every small-picture choice we make each day.  Because in a globalized world, all those choices contribute to the bigger picture, often in ways we’re not aware of and couldn’t condone if we knew better.  And as Christian educators, it’s imperative that we begin to open up these questions for our students and ourselves.  We are unequivocally called, in the strongest possible language, to love our God and to love our neighbor.  There is no commandment greater.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY: IN OUR NATION

by Lindsay Marshall

History haunts our classrooms. Schools in wealthier districts have all they need and then some, while schools in the low income areas struggle for basic supplies. But it doesn’t stop there. Take a look at the demographic information from these schools, and you’ll find that disparity falls along lines of historical racial prejudice. Beyond that, study after study shows that, even within the various social classes, students of color consistently perform below their peers. Something’s rotten in the state of American education, and it has been for awhile. A school system that attempted to eradicate Native American culture and segregated African-American children in failing schools continues to fail those same populations today.

It’s our history that fails them. Not what happened – that’s the past – but what we make of it. We have told ourselves for generations that America is a city upon a hill, a shining beacon of a unique commitment to democracy and freedom in the history of the world. But that warped history blinds us to our true past. We’re a nation like any other, peopled by imperfect human beings who are capable of nobility and wickedness, and throughout our history, we’ve acted on both. To pretend that good usually prevailed is not only inaccurate, it perpetuates the cycle. Like a trauma victim, we have to face what’s happened to us before we can hope to begin to heal.

The good news is that education is a miracle cure. It has the capacity to raise students above their circumstances and give them the chance to succeed on their own terms, even on our pockmarked playing field. But if we continue to codify education according to structures that pretend all students have an equal opportunity to succeed while millions of students must learn without textbooks while they, their families and friends live under the daily threat of gang violence, we’re telling the patients to heal themselves and hoarding the medicine for our own.

We need a national conversation on social and economic inequality. But before we can have that conversation, we have to take an honest look at our own past. If we insist that America is a place where hard work and industry is rewarded and misfortune is a result of a lack of personal responsibility, we must examine our system and ensure that it’s true. It can’t be coincidence that historically marginalized populations make up a disproportionate amount of the impoverished. If we want to understand that correlation, we have to begin the conversation.

If Naomi is right and our global community brings more “neighbors” into our daily lives, we have to address this issue. If we want Rebecca’s student Luis M. to have a chance to work hard and escape cycles of poverty, we have to start talking. Most important, we have to let go of our image of ourselves as uniquely gifted in the arts of liberty. As in personal character, a national character is most susceptible to hubris, and it’s when we think best of ourselves that we are capable of our worst.