by Cheryl Cumings
This year the Multicultural Affairs Committee invited its members to respond to the question of how our diversity and intersectionality impacted access to and participation in the educational system. What follows is my response.
My first 10 years were spent in an educational system established during colonialism. Even though Guyana gained its independence from British rule in 1966, the educational system was still based on the British model.
As a child I didn’t question this system. But there were some rumblings. There were people asking for books to reflect the different people in the country and the different languages spoken in the country. My family came to the United States just as this debate was heating up among the Guyanese population.
The educational system in the United States was different, but in some ways similar. Both systems focused on white male leaders, writers, generals, and philosophers. Women were rarely mentioned. African-Americans were mentioned but primarily in the context of slavery, emancipation and the civil rights movement. In high school, I became blind and learned about Helen Keller.
As a Black blind student my education contracted on some levels and expanded on others. In high school, I took physics first rather than chemistry because the chemistry teacher didn’t want me in her class. My English teacher spent time making sure I understood the readings and personally drove me to the theater performances our class attended.
Sometimes it was difficult to get braille math and science books. If not for my itinerant teacher, I probably would still be in high school learning to type, read braille and keep up with my studies. Resources and awareness of how to teach a blind student existed in the public school system but not universally in Catholic schools. As far as I know, there was never an attempt to have Catholic schools replicate the educational models which existed in the public school system. This meant that teachers could refuse to teach you and accessible books weren’t always available.
Yet, it wasn’t until college that the expansion of options in the educational system blossomed. As an international relations student, I had to learn about treaties and diplomacy, the national and international structures which facilitate relationships between nations and people. At the same time, I was introduced to writers, the storytellers who bring to life the past, reflect our present back to us, and invite us to imagine the future. I was starving, wanting to know more about the Caribbean, African-Americans, and Latin America, and then I was introduced to authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende, and my world expanded.
The overall educational system hadn’t changed, but space was made for people with other perspectives. The works of some of these authors were available through the Talking Book library; others had to be scanned and read with Kurzweil.
Today there is a great effort to close that open space. For me, there is such deep value in learning about others and learning about the common humanness of all of us.