TRADITION. Well-roundedness. Diversity. We spout off these terms, treating them as if they were universally desirable goals. We invoke these ideas to justify policies or actions. "It will promote diversity," we say. The implication is that because something promotes diversity, we should automatically favor it. But why is diversity good? The controversy over diversity in education - most recently incarnated as the debate over using standardized tests in admissions - often strays from first principles. Defenders of diversity forget to explain why we should value it.
Diversity is desirable in itself; it does justify certain policies or actions. But why? My answer is that true education is impossible if it does not occur in a diverse environment; homogeneity prevents complete education.
This is the second in a series of columns about what it means to be fully educated, about what ingredients are necessary. Last week, I started by suggesting that in order to be a fully educated person, one must first be a person - that is, one must be human. I argued that art plays a crucial role in making and keeping us human by cultivating our ability to feel - our emotional and imaginative vitality. If one cannot value some form of art, one cannot be educated.
I'm working toward a discussion of education in the traditional, academic sense. But before we talk about what college should teach us, we should consider the circumstances that make that teaching possible. That's where diversity comes in.
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Education in the broad, rich sense of the word cannot occur in a homogenous, sheltered environment. Terminology is important here. Becoming educated is different from becoming well trained. One can become trained or skilled at a specific task while surrounded by people who look, act and think very much like each other. One cannot, however, become educated in such an environment.
My personal experience is illustrative. I look back with a sense of irony on my high school "education." I attended a small, private school in North Carolina, where virtually everyone was white, upper-middle class and conservative. Though the school had many strengths, diversity was not one of them. Out of the hundreds of students who graduated during my time there, one was black. One. Other than being an embarrassing indicator of the barriers to diversity that still exist, that fact reminds me that my high school education was lacking.
I remember having class discussions about the legacy of slavery and race relations in America. We talked about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. I realize now that if I had looked around that classroom as we discussed black history, I would have seen a sea of white faces. More importantly, it's likely that not a single one of those people, at that point in their lives, had ever been in a class with a black student. We were learning facts about the history of race, but we had never lived it. We had never had to confront race in a meaningful, personally relevant way. I knew what books said about race, so I had learned a few things. But I wasn't educated. That's no big surprise. In that environment, I couldn't have been.
A minority of our education comes from professors and books. Education is more than learning what's in books. It's also learning how to use what those books tell us. It's exploring how ideas and people, books and the real world intersect. Education is the process of absorbing information and making it relevant to life.
As a result, education cannot occur in a vacuum - environment and context matter as much as content. Education should expose us to new experiences; it should push us and make us uncomfortable. Whether academic, social or personal, challenges put us in new situations and force us to react and adapt. That's when meaningful education takes place.
In a homogenous environment, people stay safe. Everyone around them looks, thinks and acts roughly as they do. They don't have to step out of their comfort zones, and they aren't forced to adapt. Without the challenges that a diverse environment creates, learning remains sterile and largely irrelevant to life. Such an experience is hollow and inadequate. One may be absorbing facts, but one isn't becoming educated.
As we think about what it means to be educated, remember that a diverse environment makes education possible. When education occurs without diversity, it doesn't really occur.
(Bryan Maxwell's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bmaxwell@cavalierdaily.com.)
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