The Unseen in Education

For the class I am currently in, we were asked to read A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind.

While we read the book we kept these questions in mind...

1. How does Cedric survive life in high school?

2. Should he be accepted to MIT -- why or why not?

3. What role does religion play in Cedric's life?

4. How does Cedric develop his identity (How does he become who he is)?

5. Why does Cedric succeed when so many others don't?

Then...

We told our definitions of education and how we think Cedric was "educated"

This was my response....

If I were to write a new definition into the dictionary for education, I would simply say “the source of learning”. Most dictionaries and scholars would agree that education is getting instruction from a school. On the other hand, most educators would probably argue that to be educated doesn’t always come from some type of institutional teaching. In Cedric’s case, I would say he was educated through his experiences or perhaps the lack of experiences.

Ballou High School was filled with “Dreambusters. [with] their favorite lines ‘you cannot’ or ‘you will not’” (136). Ballou didn’t give Cedric the type of educational experiences that most American’s expect high schools to give. However, because of Cedric’s drive to become someone and to defy the odds, he was able to recognize ways in which he was not educated. Although MIT gave Cedric a great learning experience, I don’t think that Cedric would have grown nearly as much if he would have been accepted to MIT by the grace of “feeling sorry” for him. I think the admissions at MIT did the right thing by holding him the same standards that all of their students need in order to accepted into MIT. Cedric too, had to learn from failure in order to be educated. When he went off to Brown he knew it would give him the “upper hand” in regards to education and success. (173). Unlike at Ballou, he would be encouraged to “Indulge your curiosity, challenge yourself, [and] experiment” (173).

Suskind says in his Afterword, “What makes Cedric’s cross-border journey so bracing is precisely the gap between how lives unfold in two different countries he has inhabited, both called America” (384). I think that because Cedric was educated through life’s experiences in two different “worlds”, while pushing to get his institutional education at an Ivy League college, offered Cedric a different level of being “educated”. Which most people in this country will never have, nor never understand.