What’s Your Story?

By Shaili Shah

There is something mysterious about stories. But they are not like puzzles or problems to be solved or cracked like a code. You cannot open a story up like a cadaver and identify its heart or its nourishment or its disease. If you try to open them up like boxes and point to their essential meaning, they will always elude you.

I think it’s the way they make impressions on us, the way they leave their mark (or don’t—sometimes stories are forgotten or never told). Our stories inform our way of being in the world. What stories instruct us, which ones do we come back to time and again? Which ones to we let drop by the wayside? “Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting impressions of everyday life. They bring together the past and the future into the present to provide us with structures for working towards our goals. They give us a sense of identity,” says Philippa Perry in her book How to Stay Sane. “We are primed to use stories. Part of our survival as a species depended upon listening to the stories of our tribal elders as they shared parables and passed down their experience and the wisdom of those who went before…” Stories give us ways to understand what we experience and why we’re experiencing it, helping us make sense of the world.

Stories also help us make connections between things and people and events. And making connections is basically the process of learning. Maybe education is learning what our story is and knowing when to revise or replace it–making good connections and undoing the bad ones…

Stories educate us and remind us that any kind of learning appeals to something else—an element of persuasion. Many teachers think of teaching as storytelling or as performance. And that’s because, for the learner (and I’m including teachers as learners), we have to believe that this is something we want or need to learn, that there is something at stake. Or at least we have to have a value or reason that makes us open and receptive to learning it.

You could say that stories have a power over our imaginations–they enthrall us and pull us to certain ideas and actions. They allow us to enter into the world and minds of others and have empathy. They are what we tell ourselves whether we’re happy or unhappy, are lost or have a strong sense of direction in life, struggling or flourishing.

We tell stories about everything, but not all of our stories are helpful or profound or pragmatic or accepted. Stories can transform us, can give old subjects new life. We can make interpretations, or tell stories about stories, that give an experience meaning, because that is what we crave beyond all things once the most immediate of needs (food, water, shelter, human connection) are met. We like to believe our lives matter, that the universe might be an accident but a happy one, and for that we tell stories.

Even the way stories work on us is strange. In older times, they circulated in the different ancient cultures slowly, like the erosion of rocks and the build up and movement of sand in the oceans and lakes that kept people so distanced by physical space. Now stories can flood internet space instantaneously, and they can still be kept hidden through silence and erasure, hidden by the murkiness and depth of this new type of space. Often it’s difficult to foresee what stories will gain a momentum or a following.

Sometimes stories collect in our memories, always kind of in flux and in mutation. They might be remembered with vividness, a striking clarity illuminating the way we believe things are because they gradually became a part of our inner landscape before we remember what the initial story was that made us believe it. Sometimes stories surprise us like gifts or creep up on us like nightmares. They reveal themselves to us in the most subtle ways, in the smallest details we learn about a distant relative’s life or about a person from a faraway country that we’ve only heard about in the news or online.

Here is the thing about education: often you don’t know what you don’t know. We come to class expecting to learn perhaps two things; we leave that class not having learned those two things at all but (sometimes one, sometimes five) completely different, unexpected things. When the story emerges, we’re not always sure what we’re getting.

But the most empowering thing for me is that stories can transform a life or many lives. They conceal the underlying hope or the belief in the world and that a better world is possible if we just look at the stories we hear or tell and use them. Especially in a world with so much inequality related to issues of race, class, and gender. Stories can allow us to enter into those worlds we’ve forgotten or ignored. Maybe we have to remember the old ones, or maybe we have to create new ones entirely. For me, it’s a reminder to keep thinking about stories and their power, how I learn so much about the world from stories, how I have to learn to be discerning as to what stories I let change my life. For me, education matters because it means the possibility that we can create new and better stories, for both ourselves and others. And when we find something that matters to us and gives meaning to our lives, the impulse is deeply rooted in what it means to be human—keep going; tell them stories.

Why Education Matters

By Scout Wilkins

I am so delighted by this question, especially with it coming, as it did, in person at a small cafe in my hometown of Springdale, Utah. One of the most beautiful places on a planet filled with beautiful places.

Danica (the creator of this blog, thank you, Danica!) and her mother were sitting at a nearby table and we struck up a conversation about good places to visit, trails to take, and wonderful ways to spend their precious time here. Soon we were comparing notes about what we do in the world, and talking about why education matters.

Just a few days before, I had completed a Wilderness First Responder course, and in that course had had a powerful, visceral connection with why education matters.

A critical focus in backcountry emergency medicine is shock in all its forms…whether from bleeding, dehydration, a sting, or a diabetic issue – shock is a fascinating bodily response to things being out of balance.

The more I learned about how physiology works, especially the intricacies of shock, the deeper my gratitude for this incredible body I am living in, and the greater my determination to take even better care of it.

And all this made me totally aware, even before Danica posed the question, of the importance and beauty of education.

This clarity fit right into my vision and my purpose in this life, which is:

To live in and help create a world filled with self-actualized people, who love themselves, love one another, and love the earth, and act accordingly.

This love comes through education. It comes through the deepening understanding that creates a richer and fuller experience of love, appreciation and gratitude for the beauty of things. An understanding which includes both cerebral learning and heart-felt connection and feeling.

“In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will only love what we understand. We understand only what we have been taught.” -Baba Dioum

Learn about yourself, learn about the world, other people, how things work…never stop learning. Learning and loving. Loving and learning.

Namaste

Education matters for the good life.

By Danica Savonick

When I was first encouraged to think about why education matters and what it would look like if economic concerns could disappear, I stopped dead in my tracks. It seemed so natural, especially as a graduate student, that education is important. But because it has become common sense that education=good, lack of education=bad, it is perhaps more urgent now than ever to interrogate the fantasies that underscore these equations.

What follows are my compounding thoughts on these issues over the past year. I begin with an excerpt from a quasi-manifesto that articulates what I’m fighting for when I organize, demonstrate, write, think, move, and shout for free education. Next is a portrait of my ideal university. And finally, a brief consideration of my hopes for Education Matters.

Based on my subject-position both within and beyond institutions of “higher” learning, a lot of what I have to say may be misconstrued as insensitive insofar as it lacks a consideration of the racial, class, and gendered obstacles towards education. What I ask for is a momentary suspension of disbelief that these issues could ever disappear, and in return, I promise to continue working for their eradication.

What I’m fighting for
I’m fighting for an opportunity: an opportunity for reorientation, an opportunity to break free from the normative life path I was ushered towards and to enter a place where values are imagined otherwise. In other words, I am fighting for the possibility of me all over again. I am fighting for a cure to boredom, alienation, restlessness, aimlessness, inauthenticity, angst, silence, passivity, and consumption, the silent killers of imagination that foreclose paths towards a better good life. People find all different ways of overcoming these deadening affects but my path was routed through public higher education, which is why I think it is so important. To breakthrough meaninglessness into a world of profound significance is an experience powerful enough to shatter a system of value based on wealth-accumulation and heteronormativity.

I am in graduate school because I love studying literature, and somewhere along the way someone gave me permission to pursue what I love rather than what is expected of me. This world is changed through great teachers teaching provocative texts and class discussions that leave (usually only a handful of) students breathless as they step out of the classroom. Those discussions captivate, obsess, and radically change those who are touched by them. They radiate, reverberate, and alter patterns of human behavior, which changes the shape of history.

I am fighting for those moments where the self gets lost, so enthralled in a project that the time that is always slipping through our fingers is forgotten. I am fighting to hear my idea spoken back to me by someone who made it possible for me to think it in the first place. I am fighting to have something to say to someone who cares. I am fighting to give birth to an idea and then watch it grow into something beautiful, far beyond my control. I am fighting to talk with other people rather than at them.

My ideal university
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney encourage subversive intellectuals to be “in but not of the university” (The University and the Undercommons 101), but what would a university look like that we would want to be both in and of?

If all economic considerations could truly be placed aside, an imaginative leap that is actually really hard to make, my ideal university would be organized around the project of cultivating student curiosity. Students would come to college to learn what it is they are passionate about and would spend their time discovering and proliferating their interests. A fundamental assumption of this vision is that we need to learn how to live a good life, that it is not something inherently given or innate. Students would move within the university from one passion to another at the will of their desires. Lesson #1 would have to be in the art of freedom: how to listen to and learn from desire in the absence of money. Students could stay as long as they wanted and perhaps forever considering there may be, for some students, very little incentive to return to whatever lies beyond this idealized university. Insofar as desire leads to the exploration and generation of knowledge, students would find themselves at home in this university.

In order for this hypothetical university to come to fruition, it would need to employ wonderful teachers with a wide range of skills and knowledges. The criteria for their employment would be their ability to inspire and mentor students, and their willingness to cultivate the intellectual friendships upon which this university depends. The teachers most suited for such a university would be those who understood themselves as sometimes a teacher and sometimes a student. Teachers would foster the conditions under which they could recede into the background as students learn to teach one another. Free from any economic considerations, the only goal of higher education would be for students to find and explore something they are passionate about. Again, an assumption that I am making is that desire is not inherently aligned with the desire for material wealth and that it can be re-oriented through the cultivation of passions. Though I don’t pretend to possess any understanding of human nature, I do think that this university would make the good life a reality for curious and creative individuals who might have ended up elsewhere without this experience. The paradox of my ideal university is that money needs to disappear from the equation in order for love of money to disappear as that which we invest in as the means towards a good life.

This vision of education bound to passion and curiosity would want a university that serves as a place to become intoxicated by the pursuit of knowledge and dwell therein. There would be no material accumulation but human flourishing in abundance. I think what we can glean from such a thought experiment is the understanding that as educators we ought to work with the fundamental assumption that if we do our jobs well enough, students lives can be changed forever. This, in a way, allows us to bracket economic implications and conceive of everything we do as educators as aspiring to orient students on a path towards a good life. As long as we remain on this path we are proving its viability. Though a materialist analysis of education is important, this other piece of the project foregrounds the limits of a purely economic approach to education. Reducing education to solely a means for socioeconomic mobility can eclipse its potential to materialize the good life in other exciting ways.

Final thoughts for now
As the curator of this blog, I’m excited to see what kinds of reactions and responses it elicits. Although I’ve been encouraged by some organizers to treat it as the “means” towards an “end,” I hope that as a space of thought experimentation it skirts the very logic of parsing the world into means and ends. The open-endedness of this endeavor speaks to the uncertainties surrounding the future of education. Hopeful uncertainties, not necessarily uncertainties to shy away from. Uncertainties that demand creativity, thoughtfulness, and attention. As for the future of this blog, which I hope is entwined with the future of education, to quote Conor Tomás Reed: “I want what I cannot yet fathom.”