That Which Separates Us

Education by ~maxplay on deviantART

A few days ago, I got the chance to catch up and chat with Taylor, a good friend I had known since kindergarten. We were next door neighbors until my family moved to a different part of town just before 8th grade. Since I moved, we drifted apart - it being in the years before cellphones and high-speed internet (I almost can't believe that cellphones and high-speed internet were once not part of my daily life).

Of the things we talked about, the state of education came up. We both agreed that after health care reform, education reform would - should - be the next major social change. Taylor told me how he felt cheated out of a good education before he went to undergrad. This shocked me, as we went through the same public school system (one of the best in our state) and my recollection was the polar opposite of Taylor's. It hit me that even before I moved, there may have been another element that separated us; there was something going on within him that I was oblivious to.

In retrospect, our public school system was almost two-tiered: the regular classes and the honors/advanced classes. For most of our K-12 education, Taylor was in the former and I was in the latter. He considered himself back then as being "at average" or "slightly below average," though I never thought that of him. He told me how he loved science, that if he could redo things he would work towards being an astronomer or astronaut, but he lacked the self-confidence and self-esteem to do well in his math and science classes. And his teachers didn't instill any encouragement in him to do better, to be better.

No one really reached out, no one worked with him to boost his confidence at math and science, and as a result he felt cheated out of the education he should've gotten. At that time I was within his reach and I would've gladly helped, but he never reached out to me and I never knew. As he said (and I paraphrase), "I had no self-esteem and no self-confidence, what kid would reach out for help when everyone was telling you that you could only be so good? How terrifying is that?"

We also talked about bullying in schools, about how middle school was pretty much bad for everyone. Taylor jokingly said, "If you actually liked middle school, then you're probably one of those jackasses who made everyone else's life suck." But the bullying problem stems even before middle school, starting sometime in elementary school. While neither Taylor nor I had been really bullied, we suffered our fair amount of teasing. And Taylor saw the bullying his older brother went through and how long afterwards it took him to put his life together.

And that's when Taylor told me his grand plan: to start a non-profit. He had originally planned to return to grad school for his Master's and work his way up in government and public policy. He currently works for an agency that helps the unemployed look for jobs. He is frustrated that his clients largely come from poverty and are often uneducated - even bordering illiterate. Out of this frustration he declared, "If this is what they're doing, then I can do better. And I don't need a Master's to do it! I want to prevent kids from turning out like me, from turning out like my clients."

While I won't go into the specifics here, I will say that his non-profit idea aims to help elementary students on an individual basis such that, come middle school and beyond, they're well-adjusted and have the confidence to succeed. He aims to do what schools have failed to do: to build a sense of community for kids. As the saying goes, "It takes a village to raise a child," and a school is supposed to be part of that village community but it has failed so many.

As Taylor aims to address one of the etiologies of the social symptom that is poverty, I will likely one day (if all goes as it's going) attend to the medical issues of kids. I hope that Taylor succeeds and I will do what I can to help and support him. It's almost inevitable that our paths will cross many times before either of us pass from this world. It seems that, despite that which separates us, some parts of us remain aligned in friendship.