January Series Reflections: Pedro Noguera

NOTE: The content of this post was originally authored for a class I'm taking this Interim on Calvin College's January Series. This content was written to be a short, one page reflection prompted by a speaker's presentation. Therefore, this post does not have much context and has not been edited (or perhaps through out) very well. It is essentially just some of my very rough, incoherent thoughts that will not be backed or exegeted well due to the nature of the original assignment.

Being raised in the rural, remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, thinking about inner-cities and all of the problems they face is a difficult task for me. I feel that Dr. Pedro Noguera did a wonderful job in getting me to better grasp the true depth and breadth of the problems that public inner-city educational systems face. A list of such problems is quite extensive: poor or no healthcare, overpopulation, economically depressed neighborhoods, broken families, poor and dangerous living conditions, instability, and perhaps most of all, a lack of hope.

Perhaps the greatest contributing factor to this lack of hope is the frustration that we all feel at seeing politicians and government officials make the same plans and promises as their predecessors: plans and promises that we all know will fail and be broken. Yet, I don’t think that most of us believe that the politicians and officials are stupid or purposefully being wasteful and ineffective. Rather, I think we realize that there is a large disconnect between the people and the policymakers; an abyss separating the two. Both sides wonder why they can’t reach the other while an abundance of resources is futilely thrown into the chasm. The people can’t figure out why they aren’t receiving the resources they believe they are entitled to and the policymakers are scratching their heads in bewilderment at the ineffectiveness of the resources they are distributing. If we are to begin addressing and fixing the inner-cities’ myriad of problems then we must first effectively deal with the central problem inner-cities face – providing a quality education in public schools.

To best do this I believe that policymakers need to have more direct contact with both the people they makes policies for and the environments in which such people live. Looking at reports and lists of statistics and numbers may be useful to some extent, but creating policies and solutions solely based on such figures isn’t good enough. The public education system not only needs, but deserves more. Policymakers need to spend ample time in the worst public schools and the harshest neighborhoods that such schools’ students come from. If we don’t have a full, comprehensive picture of the problem (specifically all of the problem’s factors rather than just how the factors manifest themselves) then how can we expect to have a real chance at solving the problem? Can you really expect to solve a complex math problem by only looking at the numbers and not the operations involved? Without practical, firsthand knowledge of public schools and their students our theoretical and detached knowledge becomes very limited in usage capability as we have no proper way to apply it.

Can we fix public school systems? Sure, but it’s clearly going to take a lot of work and not just on the part of policymakers. While they do need to go out and engage with schools and communities, the schools and communities need to reciprocate such engagement, opening up and joining in the difficult process of helping outsiders understand a specific brand of culture. Not only do they need to be open and helpful, but they also need to better understand the sense of entitlement that so many of them possess. What are people currently entitled to in regards to their public education and what should they be entitled to? What does such entitlement presuppose from the individuals that possess it? These are the questions that we must all come to answer if a better public education system is to be achieved. While answering them may be challenging, choosing not to answer them will only lead to greater challenges.

January Series Reflections:

NOTE: The content of this post was originally authored for a class I'm taking this Interim on Calvin College's January Series. This content was written to be a short, one page reflection prompted by a speaker's presentation. Therefore, this post does not have much context and has not been edited (or perhaps through out) very well. It is essentially just some of my very rough, incoherent thoughts that will not be backed or exegeted well due to the nature of the original assignment.

I’m not entirely sure what to think of Dr. Sherry Turkle’s presentation. After some reflection, it seems to me that her presentation’s main thesis, “technology is most seductive when its affordances meet out human vulnerabilities,” really is just another way of saying that technology – like other areas of life – is seductive when we’d expect it to be. Anything is most seductive to us when what it offers is something we lack; so, the fact that technology exhibits this same behavior really doesn’t tell us much about what makes technology unique. In fact, Turkle’s main thesis seems to say that technology isn’t so unique. She seems to be giving a stark warning against looking towards technology as a sort of god or savior that can save humanity from its own problems and mistakes. While this sort of warning has been issued frequently over the past decade, it was refreshing to hear Turkle’s own, insightful take on the topic.

While I mostly agree with Turkle’s overall claim that technology cannot solve all of humanity’s problems, I don’t agree with her stance on individuals’ privacy. In today’s world, Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that “privacy is no longer a social norm” seems to be a perfectly reasonable observation. I don’t think Zuckerberg was necessarily arguing that privacy shouldn’t be a social norm, which Turkle implied that he was. I’ll thus be addressing Turkles two questions given in response to his claim from the observational standpoint rather than the argumental one. After all, in today’s postmodern world who are we to be telling cultures what they should and shouldn’t be doing.

Turkle’s first question in response to Zuckerberg’s claim is, “What is intimacy without privacy?” True, there definitely is some level of privacy needed for a sense of intimacy to be had in most cases. However, Turkle seems to be taking a pretty extreme interpretation of Zuckerberg’s claim. She seems to be saying that a loss of privacy means that one no longer has control over any descriptive details of his or her own life. Privacy is then an “on or off” switch. You either have it or you don’t. Zuckerberg on the other hand seems to be taking a less extreme view of privacy, suggesting that a loss of privacy isn’t flipping a switch to “off,” but rather dialing a knob down a little. Sure some privacy is lost, but not every personal, descriptive detail. Taken with Turkle’s extreme interpretation of privacy, of course Zuckerberg’s claim comes across as absurd; however, when we reexamine what privacy is, we see that Zuckerberg’s claim accurately describes the social world we live in. We have lost full privacy because of modern social conventions like cell phones (the social norm is to have one and having one entails a loss of some privacy), but we haven’t lost total privacy as it’s not the social norm (or even possible) to broadcast all of our thoughts and feelings.

Intimacy can still be had in today’s social world. Is it as prevalent as it was in other times? Probably not; however, we can still be intimate with others if we choose to be, even in times when some level of privacy is seemingly compromised. Think of scenes from romantic comedies where two star-crossed individuals finally meet in a busy place and share an intimate moment. Sure, there are other people around that may be watching and listening, but the fact of the matter is that those other people don’t know what’s going on in the minds of the two individuals and the two individuals choose to have an intimate moment regardless of what level of privacy they have or don’t have. While such an example isn’t an actual case, it does seem to suggest that we find such intimacy, in situations where privacy may be compromised, plausible.

Turkle’s second question, “What is democracy without privacy?” also seems to fall rather flat. In a true, pure democracy everyone should be able to voice his or her own views and opinions without fear of retribution. A democracy works best when individuals are openly sharing ideas and thoughts in an effort to better the lives of others. A loss of privacy means backdoor, shady dealings that are done in private to benefit only an exclusive group of individuals. Sure, people shouldn’t be afraid of others attacking them for their ideals, but such an attack wouldn’t be allowed by a true, properly functioning democracy.

All in all, I found Turkle’s presentation informative and stimulating, even if I didn’t fully agree with all of her points. While I do not know what sort of faith Turkle has (if she has any), her message is one that Christians often need to be reminded of. Jesus, not ourselves or our technological creations, is the true savior and the ultimate way to fix the problems we face in this world.