I heard that statement recently during a professional development session on improving the educational achievement of Maori students. For many years that has been seen to be the path to “success” in schooling for minority groups. I am not going to talk about Maori students here, not because I don’t think they are important, but because I think that statement can be further extended to “I left my self at the gate”.
Schooling tends to evolve to suit a particular type of student from a particular type of background. My guess is that group differs over time and location but it is always the dominant group in that society. It makes sense because they benefit from maintaining the status quo. It also makes sense for anyone seeking to break into that group and gain access to more resources to change to fit in. “The world doesn’t owe you a living”.
I am not too sure of the significance of the trend of girls doing better than boys in school, and now women doing better than men in further education. We are not the dominant group and don’t control the allocation of resources, even within a school. I do know, however, that this educational success does not transfer to better pay for women. In NZ it is actually going in the opposite direction. As women are becoming more qualified, the income disparity with men is getting worse. I think this is probably a case of the dominant group moving the goalposts. Educational success may determine income for men, but it is not allowed to move women as a whole to a position of equality. Schools may be becoming “feminised” but society is not.
When I was young, girls did need to try to leave their gender at the school gate if they wanted any chance of “equal” opportunities. For example, I remember that it was thought that girls were inherently inferior in Mathematics and the top Maths class in my school was only for boys and a few “exceptional girls”. Anyone who wanted to progress onto higher study in Science, Medicine or Engineering needed to be in that class. I wonder how those girls felt? I know that us unexceptional girls certainly didn’t envy their status as “honorary boys”. It might have made some sense if us ordinary girls had been taught in a way that suited our female selves but actually we were just taught the same way as the boys were and any female maths teachers we had seemed to be men masquerading as women.
What does it take for a woman, or anyone outside the dominant culture, to enter the halls of success? That is something I will never know for myself, and you know, that suits me fine. I would rather be who I am, my authentic self, than change to be successful. It has taken me a long while to realise that. Not that I have been striving to be powerful and make a name for myself. I have a name. I am effective, in my own realm I am successful. What I haven’t realised is that it is I who have chosen my lack of status. I have made a series of decisions to be consistent with my self and my chosen values. Those decisions have kept me a lowly teacher…a happy teacher with a massive sense of self-worth.
What is the cost of leaving one’s culture or any other part of the self at the gate? Psychologically massive. My own education took me completely out of my social background. I have no idea what it would feel like to completely belong to a community. I have no idea what it would feel like to feel safe. I wouldn’t choose to give up who I now am, but looking back I can see that this self hasn’t had a secure path. I walk alone, and since I was not born at the top of the food chain, my survival is a freak of nature.
Early this year a young man who I knew just a little, died. He killed himself early on on his “path to success”. I don’t know why he did it. I do know what some other people said about their anger and disappointment in him. That he took an easy way out. That before he decided to take the final opt out, he had turned his life around and that he had finally had a future. My memory of him is of before he became a potential success story. My memory is of when he was an underachiever, a waste of time. My memory of him is of a totally lovely person who cared deeply about those around him and who I, an insignificant person in his world, could rely on for a smile and kind helpfulness. I don’t know why he died but I do remember that the last year I knew him he was more solemn, less likely to catch the eye and raise his eyebrows and smile. Something had changed. I don’t know if he wanted to change, I don’t know if he wanted to be on the road to success. I don’t know why he died. All I know is that the world has lost a lovely person. Personally, I would take a lovely person over success every time if I had to make a choice.
I am not qualified to talk in technical terms about how the loss of self affects the psyche. In personal terms I know that when who we are is not valued and we feel threatened enough to need to try to be, or pretend to be something else, the self disappears and it feels like it no longer exists. There is only a facade, what the world sees. There is nothing of substance, nothing of personal worth. The image in the mirror is not us, because we are not real. The image in the mirror is fragile and could break up, like a reflection in water in a gust of wind.
September 19, 2010 at 11:05 pm |
Waow. This is one of my favourite posts of yours.
When I was doing the indigenous health elective they made us do some reading (which included an article written by some NZ nurses) which compared ideas of cultural safety and cultural ease in examining how to handle patients’ culture as a healthcare professional. Cultural safety was the idea of being mindful, careful and as respectful as possible. Cultural ease meanwhile was more Carl Rogers, it referred to having self-awareness, knowing your own culture, knowing what you don’t know and being ready to admit your ignorance, and being open to learning things directly from peoples’ own mouths. Particularly because they didn’t use race alone to define cultural values, they included for example age, where you lived, or came from, or even the fact that you may have had a very mixed up background! Their basic point was – everyone is different and we simply can’t assume, so we can’t blanket response to anyone! The only way to deal with that was to be open to listening and learning and to not be afraid of how there’s so much we don’t know even though we’re “professionals”.
I didn’t really have a point. “I left my culture at the gate” just made me think of that