A system of education is a system of expectations.

From the jarring, illuminating Writers Bloc series on Guernica Mag... 


National Subjects by Aleksander Hemon

The kids were polite, gentle and sweet. Teacher Aida was warm to them, if a bit limp and unenergetic, possibly due to stage fright related to my presence—it was hard to diminish your 230 pound frame in a room full of seven-year olds. And in a flash I recognized that what they were learning here—fidgeting in a circle on their floor pillows, turned toward the teacher like sunflowers—they were learning how to be with one another, how to be together, how to live a common life. Unfortunately, the commonness of that life was possible exclusively within their ethnicity. 


What is it that we want and expect from education? To answer we have to figure out first who “we” are, to understand how “we“ come into existence. It seems self-evident to me that by passing through an education system children become citizens. Education helps them define their personal and collective identities. Ideally, it strives to give them tools so they can relate to the polity and understand themselves in some sort of communal context. In liberal democracies, the promise (and the demand) inherent in the guaranteed right to education is that the citizen who completes the system will be aware of her relation and debt to the polity. She will have had opportunities to develop a reasonably independent and inquiring mind, conscious of her rights and duties in a democratic system, ready and willing to participate. Another way to say it is that a system of education trains the subject to relate to authority—epistemological, legal, political. Not only does it disseminate knowledge, it defines what constitutes it, where it comes from and what sources of knowledge are validated by the authority and are thus legitimate.