Personal Education Experience.
This
blog will explore my personal experiences of culture and identity in relation
to education. It will draw from Hall, Neitz, and Battani (2003), as well as
from cultural pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald, and will be constrasted to a
previous blog by Lucas Widdison on the subject.
Lucas
observes Hall et al’s writings on individualism and how it mirrored his
educational experience writing that “school is perhaps the place where this
individualistic culture is really cultivated.”[1] Hall et al write about
expressive individualism, “with its goal of the cultivation and expression of
the self.”[2] Expressive individualism
is an idea that Proctor’s research shows to be dominant in the public and not
the private spheres of education. Proctor quotes one staff member of an elite
private school who says that “We are not as ‘You must carve your own way’ as
other schools might be. I think for instance in the [government schools] there
would be a more – ‘What are your values? Tease them out for yourself. Live by
them honestly’. We would probably lie more towards the ‘What are your values?
These are ours. How do you line up against that?’” I attended Sydney Boys High
School, a school which is not sure if it is a public school or a private school.
While being government funded (with a few extra contributions from old boys),
it has all the trademarks of a private school, and behaves accordingly. While
Sydney Boys may not have said ‘here are our religious values, how do you
compare to that’, they still had sets of values that students would compare and
contrast themselves to. Expressive individualism, was not one of these core
values. The school was very much un-individualistic, students were taught to
serve the school, to serve each other, and the community. Sydney Boys has one
of the largest old boys networks in New South Wales (NSW), and the most
successful and influential old boys in the state[3].
Once a member of the community, you never leave.
My
own culture was also very much anti-individualistic. This can be seen in not
only my family, but in the Christian culture and biblical truths guiding my
life, shown recently in the Archbishops address at Synod where Peter Jensen
said that people “exist in dependence on each other.” As well as in the words
of Mumford and Sons who write in ‘Sigh no more’ that “Love that will not
betray you, dismay or enslave you, It will set you free. Be more like the man
you were made to be.”[4]
Sydney
is a city full of different cultures, full of people with different
experiences. I am shaped by my experiences, by my family, by my context, but
while these influences affect my thinking I am shaped first and foremost by an
event 2000 years ago. I was destined to rightly face God’s wrath as I rejected
him in his world. Jesus took that punishment. No amount of schooling and
culture can affect my identity more than that event, because that event is
where my identity is found.
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