week of 3/13/02
 
 
 

An education in rejecting one’s heritage
By Dawn Gilchrist-Young
Editor’s note: Dawn Gilchrist-Young delivered this speech March 7 to a group of prospective teachers at WCU’s Urban-Rural Exchange.



When my former professor, John Habel, asked me to think about talking to a group of educators about my own education in rural Appalachia, I thought of 1967, the year my mother walked me out to the highway and put me on the government subsidized van heading out of the mouth of the Nantahala Gorge and into Bryson City, the location of Swain County, North Carolina’s Head Start center, there was already in place a sound public school structure. At that time, however, there was no kindergarten, and so Head Start was all there was by way of educating the pre-6-year-old set. My sister had gone the year before and was now doing famously in the first grade, and my parents expected the same of me. I complied, and so I left our cozy trailer and beloved great aunt, (with whom we had lived across the road in a rented and, to my mind, beautiful clapboard-over-log house until a few months previous). I left my occasionally drunken and rowdy great uncles, both WWII veterans who worked for my father for stretches of time long enough to get money for the local bootleggers, since Swain was still dry until 1980. I left the familiar things I loved to go and learn to stand quietly in line, to recognize the letters of my name, (though my good Christian teachers were taken aback for a very long time because I carefully and neatly printed my “w’s” upside down, thus writing “Damn” instead of “Dawn”at the top of each of my papers), and to not use my best Hank Williams’ “honky tonk” whine in singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” All of these lessons were and have continued to be of use throughout my life. At the time, of course, I was a very young child, and so everything was new and shining to me. I had no inkling that the other children and I were benefiting from a social welfare program intended to help raise us up to snuff with the rest of the country. What I feel now is a complex mixture of gratitude, that someone noticed Appalachia was poor and that education might help, and resentment, that that same someone also believed that the very substance of our lives merited pity, and required outside intervention to make us like everyone else.

All of us, however, did recognize at some level that we were vastly different from the families we saw in the books available to us. The children from the Cherokee reservation saw no children like themselves in our books, and none of us, neither Cherokee nor white, recognized anything familiar in the books’ brick ranch-style homes, sleek Pontiac Bonnevilles in which briefcase-carrying fathers sped off into clean cities, nor mothers with salon-coifed hair, lipstick, and high heels who kissed the fathers goodbye from the doorways of spic-and-span kitchens with all electric appliances. Because this is what we saw in our textbooks, it became for us the norm, a norm completely alien to what we knew. Home, for most of us at the time, was trailers, old clapboard houses with insulating plastic over the windows in winter, fathers who went to work, (when work could be had), in worn-out pickup trucks, and perpetually tired mothers who tried to make ends meet with a combination of home-canned goods and affordable groceries. This did not mean that we did not read, did not listen to the radio, did not have conversations around the supper table, and did not feel loved. Nor did it mean that the economic situation was never going to change for us. What it did mean to the greater society was just this — we were a substandard population. Perhaps the greatest blessing was that televisions, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, were still not widely owned in Swain County, and so we were spared the self-consciousness that overwhelmed me later when I learned all about Head Start and poverty and who needed help and who could do fine without it.

We did not know to question the relevance for our own lives of any of what was being presented. We did not know to fight against the devaluing of our own experience. What we were beginning to know was what Michael Harrington conveyed in his 1962 book — The Other America — that we in marginalized rural Appalachia, like those in other impoverished subcultures, were “internal exiles.” However, we were being made into something better. We were being made model citizens. We were being made consumers who would soon shun the homemade in favor of the mass produced, heterogeneity in favor of homogeneity, uniqueness in favor of conformity. We were being shown that to which we should aspire, and if it looked nothing like our reality, that was of no concern. Except for the work done at Rabun Gap School in the 1970s with the Foxfire project, and perhaps some individual and less publicized work at other schools, excluding the values of a minority culture in favor of those of the mainstream was simply what educators were supposed to do. Of course, the mainstream lifestyles proffered in the curriculum seemed as unattainable to us as did the lives in “Bewitched,” or “Lost in Space,” or “I Dream of Genie” when we were older and television had become ubiquitous in western North Carolina. For most of us, we were being shown the status quo in what might as well have been a foreign country. It was not that learning about the world outside Appalachia was bad — no, that was necessary and good. What was bad was the underlying assumption that, because we owned little of monetary value, the beliefs and traditions of our own community and families were also without value. What our books did not teach us was the great worth of who and what we were. The Dick and Jane series did not teach the Cherokee children they were the remnants and descendants of an advanced and powerful tribe still trying to maintain a credible autonomy; nor did they teach the white children that we were descendants of the tenacious Scots-Irish, survivors time and again.

What Head Start did teach us, and what the rest of our rural Appalachian education continued to teach us, was that there was a single door which one had to enter, and a single language which one had to speak in this country that had as yet to reckon with the riches and complexities of its diverse population. The job of our educators was to allow us to look into the windows of those who had power and desire what was inside, hence, the view into the middle class lives of Dick and Jane. There was no conspiracy here — just well-intentioned teachers who believed that what they were teaching us would make our lives better. They did not realize that, in teaching us only what mainstream America was learning, and excluding local and native traditions and lore, they were also teaching us that our own culture had no place in our education. In attempting to educate us away from our poverty with the tools made available to them, they were educating us away from our roots. In teaching children that “ain’t,” “han’it,” “over yonder,” “you’ns,” and other aspects of mountain dialect were unacceptable anywhere, they taught us that we had to choose between two worlds. We could either learn to use the tools of success and leave behind the place we knew, or we could fail and remain wed to our roots. Our teachers at the formative elementary level did not know, so they could not teach us, that one can learn the language of power, of the world outside, but still be a part of the place of one’s origins.

Because they taught us what they had to teach, as our education proceeded, we continued to study only what the rest of America’s public school students studied — the gross national product of Brazil, George Washington’s bravery at Trenton, how to conjugate verbs, that “i” always comes before “e,” except after “c.” All of this was necessary to understand and be accepted in the world outside. And if it seemed slightly less important than the fact that some of the students’ parents’ were no longer allowed to buy milk and bread and coffee at the local grocery until they could afford to pay on their bill, or that a neighbor’s son had that very morning gone into a rage, then taken his pocket knife and sliced up the back seats of the bus, or that they had slept little the night before because they were kept awake listening to their parents fight after their father made a “moonshine” run in order to pay part of that bill, or because they were at a late revival and people were getting saved, well, that was not part of what we were to learn. Who we were had no bearing on the mandated curriculum. Our priorities needed reordering so that we could focus instead on what we were not, but might hope to become.

If it was to happen at all, then our cultural education had to take place at home. And I was lucky in that I did have that education at home. Much of it came through a great aunt who never married, but spent most of her adult life depending upon the kindness of relatives, and, in trying to make herself useful, inadvertently enriched the lives of the children of those relatives. I was one of them, and it is because of her that I knew her versions of the Jack Tales, tales told in the British Isles and brought over to Appalachia. It is because of her that I read voraciously, since she read aloud to my siblings and me until she was hoarse. And it is because of my parents, parents who ordered “the world’s one hundred greatest literary classics” in paperback, on a shoestring budget, that I knew one could be poor without being ignorant, and lower class without being low class.

The real challenge of educating a minority population, then, whether poor and rural, or poor and urban, is to take into account what financial poverty does to a child, but to keep in mind that financial poverty does not equal cultural poverty. Bluegrass music, ballads, rap, blues, and jazz are all products of impoverished communities, but not impoverished cultures. One cannot teach children about the world outside without reference to their own, unless one wishes to throw out the baby with the bath water.

All of this, however, is not to say that there were no instances of teachers who did take our lives and communities into account. I can remember a few progressive and perceptive individuals who created opportunities for learning about aspects of mountain culture. They were the ones who brought in storytellers, or engaged us in clogging and square dancing, or told us Cherokee legends, or brought in community members who spun, made dyes, wove, and quilted, or taught a hunter safety course. The lesson in all of these was that there was something of value in our origins. The lesson this taught us was that, although there was indeed a big world outside, we could best make our way in that big world if we also knew our own region, history, and worth. But there were only a few of these kinds of lessons.

In feminist writer Bell Hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, she writes about the joy of her early education, before desegregation, in an all black school where the teachers believed that “teaching — educating — was fundamentally political,” and where the teachers “contextualized [students’] effort and ability to learn ... within the framework of generational family experience.” That is, teachers thought the students’ lives outside the classroom were of value, could only add to and so should be part of what was happening within the classroom. [H]ooks also says “... we all bring to the classroom experiential knowledge ... this knowledge can indeed enhance our learning experience.”

And so, had my rural and mostly wonderful teachers been given permission, or given themselves permission, to discuss what was most real to us, our own experience, along with the middle-class, mainstream curriculum, that would have been the beginning of encouraging us to see ourselves as an important part of the whole picture, rather than unimportant and on the fringes. Had our second-grade teacher chosen to acknowledge the Christmas gift of homemade jelly from the poorest student in the class, that child would have understood the value of his mother’s summer blackberry picking. And had our fifth-grade music teacher played Bill Monroe’s remarkable music alongside that of John Philip Sousa, we might have gleaned something of the heritage behind the newly created bluegrass music. Further, had our sixth-grade teacher taken the ramps left beneath the radiator one morning, and used them as an entry into educating us about edible plants of our region, we would have recognized the biological uniqueness of our mountains. Had our teachers, as a united body of political workers, pulled together to show us the importance of what we brought from our homes and communities, we would have had the great pleasure of approaching the less isolated world with confidence in our own identities.

The good news is that education is always in flux, and so it continues to change and, for the most part, progress. The good teachers I know in the school systems today consistently encourage students to use the materials of their lives to help make connections with new information. This is especially important because students within minority cultures are constantly bombarded with the message that there is only one paradigm, and that they are of little worth if this paradigm is unattainable to them. Making connections between real lives and the classroom is especially important because, for children, there is not a single norm. Every experience, especially their own, is of value to children — unless we teach them otherwise.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches high school English in Swain County.)