Response to Adrienne Rich "Teaching Language in Open Admissions"

"There seemed to be three ways in which the white middle class could live in New York: the paranoiac, the solipsistic, and a third, which I am more hesitant to define (15)."

This essay was so reflective of the current milieu that it felt like it could've been written today. It fits nicely with the current social movements that have manifested over the past two years like Occupy Wall Street. Currently, we see the battle between corporate forces in education that threaten to take over higher education, resulting in a growing tide of students that have been disenfranchised due to the rising costs of student loans. I think Adrienne Rich had her finger on the pulse of the times and this memoiristic piece gives a very personal and honest account of the reasons why a teacher would want to teach at City College during the Open Admission period of the late 1960s. Although Rich admits that her "white liberal guilt" compelled her to teach to "disadvantaged" children, I think she gives her motivations less credit than she should. Rich was fighting to provide an opportunity to learn and experience language in an environment where the only emotion given to students was skepticism. As she points out, these seemingly "ghetto" students would have been able to handle the demands of language and syntax because of their "growing capacity for political analysis" that showed them first-hand the urban blight of their communities; in a classroom setting, this kind of analysis is not granted to them so there is the feeling of powerlessness, yet when they channel that knowledge of their communities, that street knowledge, onto the academic page, they can become savvy rhetors. Adrienne Rich sums it up best: "they came to college with a greater insight into the actual workings of the city and of American racial oppression than most of their teachers or their elite contemporaries." This to me, seems so commonsensical and prompts me to ask "Why don't we find a way to harness that capability, or at least acknowledge students that they are more than capable of becoming capable citizens?" These students know the economic and political realities that we only theorize about in our Adult Education class. Our literacy narratives, I think, ultimately fall short in encapsulating these lives. I don't want to generalize and say all students are like this but we at least have to admit that students are more than capable of this.