"Space: The Final Frontier"

I was thinking more today about the effects environments have on education- how space plays a huge role in the psychological and social expansion of a child’s educational parameters. Some typical generalizations bounced about the pate for a moment- the suburban high school I attended, which was situated within the rolling green foothills of northwestern New Jersey, came to mind. I pictured myself walking out of the main entrance to catch the bus, facing a panoramic window of High Point monument, the totem pole of Kittatinny Mountains, on a wall of whimsical farmland pastors. Picture that Irish Spring commercial when the guy cuts the soap... that’s the comfort and ease you felt going to high school in Wantage Township.



Although I took it for granted at the time, growing up and going to school in this setting was an amazing experience. I didn’t really notice it until I went away for college and even later on when I went away to tour with Folly, that I was truly blessed to grow up where I did. The university life seemed loud, chaotic, uncertain, and fast; the tour van was by no means an exception to these characteristics. They both heavily contrasted the quiet and slow-paced era of my childhood and adolescence, where everything seemed secure and limitless. We didn’t have “gun violence” nor did we even have local law enforcement. Does that speak for the ease of our education? I mean, doesn’t that make sense? Perhaps our world was balanced- huge and explorative and yet geographically isolated enough to provide us the psychological confidence we needed to grow… Doesn’t that seem logical- a relaxing environment equals an expansive experience within that environment?

I then tried to step out of my stability and picture what it would be like to apply that same rationale to living in a violent urban environment. I thought of how the routine fear of living your life must make living and learning an inherently routine struggle. Schools in areas take in children from hostile neighborhoods- where crime and poverty are not an option, but rather daily realities- and have to teach these children within that fearful environment. Audre Lorde wrote in The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, “…we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

I also considered that urban areas may actually produce populations of intrepidity. Are these areas perhaps fearless? Constant exposure to human depravity may saturate and numb these children. In Culture Jam, Kalle Lasn wrote, “The blunting of our emotions is a self-perpetuating process. The more our psyches are corroded, the more desensitized we become to the corrosive. The more indifferent we become, the more voltage it takes to shock us. On it goes, until our minds become a theatre of the absurd, and we become shockproof” (Lasn 23). Do these children live their lives under an alarming blanket of awkward indifference to their surroundings? Does this contribute to achievement in schools?

I would also contend that a natural setting is a causal agent against literacy. When students allow fear to become so incumbent in their mind-set, they immediately set limitations on what they can read and write. As Lorde offers, the fear chokes them. Before they even begin a task, they may set boundaries on that task out of fear of failure. They’re passive because they are fearful that they won’t achieve- much like how they are numb to the reality that they may not even live to see another day. So they remain silent- but why are they holding it back? For what? For when? In a similar way to how they buy into the projection that they are bound to fail in life, they buy into the fact that they are destined to fail as readers and writers. Perhaps this is why Gary Busey refers us to the acronymic definition of fear: “false evidence appearing real.” If writing and reading assignments play on students’ fears to separate their thought from action, their reading and writing becomes detached- thoughtless, powerless and diseased.