Places of Grave Disappointment
In college, I frequented a canteen that kissed the activity centre. There, amid citric beverages and bitter tea, one could often sport interesting conversations. I remember debating student concerns in the quad until mosquitoes bit us dry, or discussing book recommendations with friends, or listening to people talk about their lives. I would later term this ‘community reading’: collaborative meaning-making and experience-sharing. Political as this act is, it presents a prerequisite to coming into knowledge; if I under-represent informal spaces in education, I would shortchange my readers.
Political education had eluded my formative years. During my undergraduation, however, I discovered the distinction between what is natural against what merely appears so. Gender, I realised, was the latter. Sexuality—definitions matter—can barely be the former unless pigeonholed into a constrained form. This distinction revealed peculiarities in an otherwise splendid university façade.
On Disappointment
I recall one canteen experience vividly. My friend beckoned me to join her as she spoke with people she introduced as a professor and his wife. They turned toward me as I sat down. Ma’am asked me how I felt about the campus given that I had completed two years there.
My political education was rough. Universities, I believed like my aides, were subject to loftier standards than society. The students, I believed unlike my aides, could be trusted to mark our moral compass. My politics within these spaces has tracked these assumptions. Yet, universities let you down one way or the other—the institute towers upon people it chooses not to see: workers under contract, students deviating from a male image, uncompromising staff members. And our education does not teach us to treat our experience as final without trying to do something about it, without feeling something about it.
“I am disappointed,” I said, considering the question.
The professor and his wife were aghast. Now, I understand their anxiety better. Education, I think, should obviate disappointment, create hope. As a teacher, I do not want my children to only learn stuff; I want them to like what they learn and the situation that they learn it in. It is not a terrible ask.
“Disappointed! Why?” they asked.
Disappointed because students we taught were harassed by the guards. Disappointed because our peers believed that hazing their juniors was an effective way of making them more conversant. Disappointed because wardens exercised illegitimate authority in the hostels. Disappointed because students, who I deeply believed in, would not raise their voices for the simple matters of daily existence that plagued everybody on campus. “Disappointed,” I said, “because once upon a time, the school on campus admitted the children of both workers and their faculty members. Then, the faculty deemed the children of the workers unfit to study in that school. This forced them into a different school, underfunded and lacking resources, one that could not even be seen from the streets around it.”
Disappointment is revelatory: it demystifies concerns that students recognize about their learning. I have observed teachers taking disappointment into stride in minor classroom engagements: about tricky assessments, about confusing lectures, about comments made or left unsaid—disappointments are generative moments because they delve into the recesses of our evaluation. Disappointment is unsettling too: it disrespects intent. If a lecture is to be arranged a certain way, if it is natural for society to be a certain way, then disappointment shows maladjustment, a fault in the individual for being so damn disappointed. Here, as teachers, we make a choice.
Legitimate Concerns
“You can’t be disappointed about that,” Ma’am said.
“Why not?”
“I have seen these children. No one is excluding them; they just cannot clear the school admission tests. My neighbour teaches some of the children—they cannot perform simple numeracy functions even in higher grades.”
All was true. The children were not being excluded by someone, if exclusion reduces to solitary exercise. It was conceivable that they did not clear numeracy tests and lacked that ability. Yet, her conclusions were wrong. We do not build schools so that they may prefer students with ability; we build them so that they may assist students in creating their abilities. That students were numerically challenged could have been the result of their exclusion, not its cause. I pointed out that it was not naturally ordained that children of some class backgrounds lacked certain abilities.
I should motivate two ideas here. First, few people I have met still argue about natural decree; many are content, instead, to foist progressive arguments on the issue. They argue that children may be products of weak culture if not constitution, that people from the working classes simply do not care. Despite the problems with this argument, one comes across anecdotes that demonstrate exactly this. However, even if we allow its shortcomings, the argument fails to explain why a child’s local culture should determine their education and therefore their life chances. That would be like saying that Harry Potter does not deserve to go to Hogwarts because Uncle Vernon or Aunt Petunia do not care enough for him.
Second, Bourdieu, a French sociologist, presented a typology of capital. He explained that just like economic capital, people also possess cultural capital: tools and conceptions that are socially prized, as well as social capital: networks that lead to better life chances. He also elaborated how one kind of capital can become another. Children from servant quarters were hemmed in on campus—they were denied social relationships under the pretext of the noise they made. They could not access spaces: grounds, library books, festivals, that children of faculty members had access to. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that the deprived have to be exceptional in order to be ‘normal’.
I could not articulate these nuances half a decade ago. Having unsuccessfully argued that segregation reproduced hierarchies, I decided to give up. The professor said, “In two years, you should not say that you are disappointed. That is a strong word.”
I viciously retorted, “What can a student who has spent two years be legitimately disappointed with?”
On Hope
Hope and disappointment are too quickly opposed. Disappointment, however, is not despair; it does not look forward to a bleak horizon. Disappointment spies the past, takes stock of how things have been. Hope, we believe, promises the future, plans how things should be. That there is disappointment does not necessarily mean that there can be no hope. Perhaps, students need to be disappointed enough about the world to do something about it.
The professor said, “You can talk about academics. You can talk about sports.”
He meant that I could talk about my individual engagement with my curriculum. Never, in the intervening years since this conversation, was I more convinced that there was a need to engage with everything but that.
