The Costa Rican school year is about to end – here classes and grades run from January to December. Last week, Nate and I were invited to give a series of workshops to elementary school students in Portalón. We ran three workshops over the course of three days – making books with the 1st and 2nd graders, do art about themselves and their communities with the 3rd and 4th graders, and discussing the importance of going to high school with 5th and 6th graders.
The work with the 1st through 4th graders was great. They were energetic, had trouble listening and waiting their turn, talked out a lot in class, asked for help constantly, and… they were tons of fun. As an old cynic, I am constantly amazed at how open young children can be when you make things interesting, are willing to act a little goofy, and give them some positive attention.
The workshop for fifth and sixth grade was a bit more challenging. We used an existing curriculum from Junior Achievement about the economic incentives for staying in school and modified it to our audience and time constraints (one big challenge: the older kids are distracted because vacation is just a few days away and see that we have little authority over them as we are not their regular teachers). We talked about success in life, dreams for the future, how much money high school graduates versus drop-outs make, how to build a budget and live within your means. The kids had to write a letter to themselves in 10 years, expressing their goals for future jobs and the work they could start now to achieve their dreams. All this to a large group of boisterous pre-teens, some of whom had already been held back a year, most of whom have parents who did not go to high school or dropped out of high school. A workshop all the more needed for being held in a small rural town in which unemployment runs high and parents sense that new skills and education levels are needed for their children to succeed in a vastly altered economy, but, maybe because they themselves aren’t sure about the future, don’t talk to their kids much about specific plans. And these kids are heading to 7th grade, the grade with the highest drop-out rate (just like in the States).
At one point we asked the 5th and 6th graders to define “success,” and they ended up giving a far more holistic definition than I had expected. Having done similar work with middle and high school students in the States, I had anticipated receiving the “success = Lil’ Wayne” answer, the big car, big house, wearing-gold-chains-while-being-massaged-in-a-hot-tub-by-bikini-clad-women music video stereotype. These kids talked more about being happy, about having a healthy family, about having the freedom to do what you would like to do, about doing something you like to do. Money didn’t even come up until a good ten minutes into the conversation – and the conversation was 12 minutes long, because that’s pretty much the outer limits of group discussions with 12 year olds a week before vacation. Some of these kids, it would seem, have more realistic and healthy expectations for the future than people I know in their 30s and 40s. Are the kids just telling us what we want to hear because they’ve already done this workshop and everyone was too polite to tell us so, or are we bumping into a different cultural definition of success?
It was fascinating to see what kids knew and did not know. Fifth and sixth graders don’t know how much rent costs, or how to budget for food each month. They don’t know how much money you can make as a waiter or teacher or farm worker. They don’t know that to get a master’s degree you need at least five years of university. And many of them struggle with basic math and writing, creating a dilemma for Nate and me as teachers. How much do you encourage children to dream big and how much to realize the need to be realistic given the fact that an already sub-par education has put them at a huge disadvantage in life? I hate the feeling (whether it happens to you in Denver, Colorado or Aguirre, Costa Rica) of looking at a kid and thinking to yourself, “Let’s be realistic, you aren’t going to be a lawyer or astrophysicist. Let’s just get you through high school.” It feels like a betrayal. But those two opposing ideas are always there. You want to tell your student, “You are still young. All doors are open. You can be anything!” yet you also want to just help them hold on for dear life, keeping them away from the worst catastrophes you know are out there: drugs, early pregnancy, illiteracy, abusive households. That tension is there, in the back of your mind, during the entire session, pushing and pulling between dreams and realities. This is, I suppose, a central dilemma of all teachers, and all development workers. And it doesn’t go away.
For the most part, I want kids to have ridiculous ambitions. They should aim to be astronaut veterinarian rock stars, because outsized dreams often lead us to achieve things we never expected we could – or that others told us we could never do. I know it’s my own cultural bias, but I find it depressing when all the girls in the room say that having a family is the most important marker of success to them, because – especially from 6th to 10th grade – the girls are always the smartest people in the room. The kid who wants to be a truck driver is being realistic, and the economic jump he’s contemplating – his father’s an agricultural day laborer, doing intermittent, subsistence-wage work – is probably larger and more ambitious than anything I could ever contemplate. Why do I want him to tell me he wants to be a forensic pathologist? Am I setting kids up for failure or pushing them to aim higher?
And where to you tell kids to aim in a developing society that you yourself are new to? These kids watch YouTube videos on their 3G phones in class. But their parents have been peons their whole lives. Costa Rica produces both microchips and bananas in great numbers. Which world do you point students toward?
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