![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
take me to the river
Aug. 27th, 2014 05:49 pmre-thinking an exercise from my education:
when I was in the seventh grade, my multi-age grade 6-8 class went on an extended field trip; divided into two groups, the Haves and the Have-Nots, we spent a weekend mimicking c19th farm life. I was one of the Haves, and we were bored; the Have-Nots had to do hard work, but they had a lot more fun. Reflecting on the trip, I'm not actually sure what the lesson on socioeconomic class division was supposed to be. I remember concluding, with my friends, that it meant that it wasn't such a bad thing to be poor - and as our families were relatively poor, it wasn't a bad thing to have reinforced that money can't buy happiness. But looking back I'm struck by the way we were set up to overlook systemic oppression. Of course most kids are going to have more fun doing vigorous playful outdoor work than sitting quietly in an empty room. Cyclical poverty isn't like that. You don't get to go home, and it's not fun working for low/no wages when you're an adult with skills that deserve to be fairly valued. They taught us the wrong damn lesson, and likely lessened some of my classmates' tendency to empathize with the righteous anger of the exploited; we were Have-Nots too, for a weekend, and it was nothing to get upset about. 100% certainly it reinforced the blindness of all of the kids who were Haves, myself included, to the real benefits we gained through our various race/class/gender privileges; we were all of us white.
when I was in the seventh grade, my multi-age grade 6-8 class went on an extended field trip; divided into two groups, the Haves and the Have-Nots, we spent a weekend mimicking c19th farm life. I was one of the Haves, and we were bored; the Have-Nots had to do hard work, but they had a lot more fun. Reflecting on the trip, I'm not actually sure what the lesson on socioeconomic class division was supposed to be. I remember concluding, with my friends, that it meant that it wasn't such a bad thing to be poor - and as our families were relatively poor, it wasn't a bad thing to have reinforced that money can't buy happiness. But looking back I'm struck by the way we were set up to overlook systemic oppression. Of course most kids are going to have more fun doing vigorous playful outdoor work than sitting quietly in an empty room. Cyclical poverty isn't like that. You don't get to go home, and it's not fun working for low/no wages when you're an adult with skills that deserve to be fairly valued. They taught us the wrong damn lesson, and likely lessened some of my classmates' tendency to empathize with the righteous anger of the exploited; we were Have-Nots too, for a weekend, and it was nothing to get upset about. 100% certainly it reinforced the blindness of all of the kids who were Haves, myself included, to the real benefits we gained through our various race/class/gender privileges; we were all of us white.