Contrast and the Call for Temperance
Like energy between electron levels or the transfer of heat from one room to another, information moves across differences. So, too, then, must education. Education occurs as an effect of contrast.
Generally speaking, exposure in some form or another (whether externally introduced or internally generated) to contrast is how the potential for new realities are conceived. Being an educator means operating as a purveyor of difference. It means plying a trade in which contrast is of utmost value. Contrast, in fact, is what we educators seek to dispense, and we do so whenever we find ourselves introducing new concepts within our curriculum, taking students on field trips, or asking students to perform some type of community service in another neighborhood.
Still, valuing contrast for the critical teaching lever it is raises some important questions. For instance, how do we value contrasting realities without devaluing current ones? How can we simultaneously empower young people to invest in their current realities while inspiring within them an interest in alternate possibilities? How does the promotion of aspirational desires erode such investment in the present, and what are the implications of such erosion upon local communities and on family connections? For students of foreign descent, or for many minority students, what is the impact of contrast—so convincingly introduced—on their sense of culture and on what they consider to be their ancestral traditions?
So often (in fact, so often as to appear stereotypical), young minority students hailing from urban communities are presented with white, suburban, middle-class concepts as the contrasting reality to which they must aspire. Ascribing to such shibboleth has nearly become educational orthodoxy among reformers, charities, non-profit agencies, and service programmers alike, at a cost of devaluing what is native for many students.
In general, perceived resource differentials between any two circumstances are likely to influence the value judgments we place on contrasting realities. The result is the formulation of rather simple correlations that pit urban students of color on the receiving end of white, middle-class charity.
But what if we changed the charity model (in effect introducing contrast into the charity domain, itself)? What if urban educators, for instance, encouraged students to perform service within their own communities? Doing so would fulfill more than a few purposes. 1) Such an initiative would teach students the value of “giving back” by having them invest in their own communities. 2) Such an initiative might cultivate a brand of leadership that extends beyond concepts of exceptionalism to include a spirit of activism. 3) Such an initiative might encourage participants to feel that they do not exist merely as charity cases, but instead as endowed with their own powers of efficacy and with gifts to share in the lives of others. 4) Such initiatives might spur the creation of much-needed partnerships across the educational divide of public and private systems—urban public schools, for instance, paired with suburban private schools, collaborating as true equals to address their shared charge, a common duty in educating our nation’s youth.
For such educational utopia to exist, we must suspend any judgments regarding the value of any single reality lived out by our students; yet, we must do so while still promoting the elevation of expectations and aspirational picturing necessary for future success in life. Balancing the temperance needed to suspend judgment with the excitement of aspirational thinking requires discipline for anyone serving in an educational capacity on behalf of others.
