My cousin's son is joining a doctoral program. In five years, he will become the latest PhD in the family.
My mother's generation was the last one that didn't go to college. We used to joke about their high school diploma, which was called SSLC. While it officially expanded to Secondary School Leaving Certificate, for most girls the reality was the joke that we made: Stop Studying, Learn Cooking! My mother was 18 years old when she married my father.
Since then, undergraduate degrees have become the norm, with professional qualifications and advanced degrees becoming more common than not for girls and boys alike.
The last illiterate person in the family was a few generations ago. While I am familiar with most of the important family stories, I had to resort to guessing who might have been the last of the illiterates going back in the family tree.
I was surprised to learn that my mother's great-grandmother, Meenakshi, was illiterate. I was confident that she was literate and that her mother would have been the last who didn't know how to read and write. My mother, who has clear memories of her great-grandmother Meenakshi, said that she couldn't read or write. Perhaps Meenakshi had somehow learnt to sign her name in legal documents, but that was the extent of what she could do with pen and paper.
It is all the more impressive that Meenakshi--an illiterate woman, who was widowed when quite young, in a very conservative household in a small town (er, village)--knew how to deal with farmlands, buy and sell property. She, ultimately, made bright futures possible for the rest of us!
Meenakshi's grandson--my grandfather--was the first in the family to earn a college degree in the educational system that we now understand as the norm. He was a metallurgical engineer, which also made him the first engineer in the family.
It wasn't until I became a university professor that I truly started understanding the stories behind the vast numbers of people without college degrees. And, therefore, what a phenomenally privileged life that I was born into.
The cultural capital that was accumulated over the generations is more valuable than any physical capital like land or gold. All it took back then was for a big time burglar for one to lose one's wealth, most of which was in the form of gold jewelry at home. A couple of years of bad harvests could set back even a wealthy landowner. But, the cultural capital via education, music, an awareness of the world, cannot be robbed and can also be successfully passed along to the next generations. And that's what I benefitted from.
Me getting a PhD decades ago is not that much an individual accomplishment as much as it was the product of this vast cultural capital. Meenakshi and others made my PhD possible. Writing these, I was reminded of an old New Yorker cartoon, which I tracked down:
When I started teaching, which was at a regional public university, a significant percentage of the students were the first from their families to go to college. In terms of collegiate education, I had almost a 100-year head start on them, if I looked back in the family tree.
As a society, should we be concerned about the favorable starting positions that some kids have, and the unfavorable points from where other kids start? If so, what should we do collectively? Do you think about these when you vote for your candidate/party?
No comments:
Post a Comment