What’s So Funny ’bout Peace, Love, and EDUCATION?

Tonight it was back-to-school night for the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) for which I’m an English Conversation Partner. This is the fourth year I’ve been a tutor/conversation partner here at the Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries located just west of Port Authority.

My conversation partners were recent arrivals to the States. A. from Peru, N. from Ecuador, and S. from China. In a circle we sat, as I launched the conversation by asking them how long they’d be in the United States and how long they had been studying English. Consistently, they each started learning English in grade school. In each of their countries, they revealed, they wanted to learn more English but the education systems were inadequate or too impoverished to afford this luxury.

N. from Ecuador then asked if you needed to be a high school graduate to get into college. Yes, I said. But if you don’t have one you could try for a GED. She pulled out index cards from her purse and wrote this down. A. from Peru explained you have to work hard to get awards. Scholarships, I suggested. S. from China held a notebook on her lap, eager to write down any information that might be new to her. Underneath it she had a large, thick hardcover English-Mandarin dictionary that she tore open every so often while sitting on the edge of her chair, listening carefully. She wanted to participate in our conversation so much I thought she’d fall over.

At work this morning an entry-level employee asked me if I would help her with her college application essay. She dropped out of college after trying it for two years. She explained she was too immature to value what her Dominican parents were begging her to stick with. She gave birth to a darling daughter. Now two years old, this little girl’s mom wants to return to college while working full-time, and to study for as long as it takes to get a bachelors degree. Tonight she’s curled up in her apartment doing practice exams for the ACT which she’ll take later this month. Her boyfriend, the father of her child, is using their kitchen table to study for his master’s degree at night. Their daughter likes to copy them; she sits on the floor with a big crayon writing the names of friends from her new daycare in curly-cue scribbles.

In today’s column in the New York Times, Bob Herbert wrote that America has to revolutionize the education system. He challenges those who think the style and methods of an American education sourced in the post-World War II era are serving America’s students today. There’s a woeful gap betweeen how our nation is educating children and how other nations around the world are educating theirs.

When I listen to the range of students I encountered today, each born outside the States, and hear their hope that an American education will improve their lives I bite my lip. Is it an illusion or a self-delusion we have that our education is better than any other nation’s? For all that these adult students have sacrificed, and are sacrificing, to be educated I pray we won’t let them down. As I pray we don’t let any American student down either.

Getting a fine education that will allow us each to contribute to advance humanity cannot be ceded to a lottery based on the luck of geography. As Herbert writes, we can do better than that for each other.