My husband and I are struggling with a parenting question. Bin is from China where people are judged based on their party affiliation or connection to political power, which is really one in the same. His upbringing taught him that people are their socioeconomic class, the names of the various educational institutions where they studied. In Bin’s words, “In China, people judge by your parent’s social status and money.”
He brings his references to our painful struggle to decide which school district to move to so our daughter will have a good education. I told him I’d like to move to the school district where my colleague’s son just graduated high school and was selected to all 3 of the service academies in the United States – West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy. The problem is, my colleague’s son was most probably the only student from that school who was so honored. So it was not the name of the institution on his application that got him accepted. I assume most universities are looking for the content of the character of the students they select.
Of course, content of character is subjective and difficult to judge. But what it is almost certainly not is a list of attributes that actually have nothing to do with the individual knowledge, skills and abilities of that one student. A list like family class, ethnicity, gender, political connection and other elements of the “accident of birth.”
I’m going to go back to my case example, my colleague’s son. But let’s start with my colleague, Norris Agnew, born 40+ years ago in rural Mississippi as an African-American male. And since that time, he served in Okinawa, Japan (2 yrs), South Korea (1 yr); Belgium (2 yrs); mainland Japan (6 yrs); Germany (3 yrs). He spent more time was overseas than stateside. He has traveled the world over in 20+ years with the U.S. Air Force. He has become, in an overused and trite term, cosmopolitan. He’s still American, but he’s also international and transnational. He’s an award winning broadcaster and a former instructor at the DOD school of journalism with a master’s degree from John Hopkins. He’s married to a lovely Korean woman.
This sets the background for his son, who was raised bilingual Korean-English. Undoubtedly at least one of the attributes the military service academies saw in him was his native fluency in the language of one of our greatest adversaries, North Korea, and one of our strongest allies, South Korea. I assume his SAT scores and grades were extraordinary, but so are all the grades and scores of students applying to the Ivy League, and yes, I consider the service academies on par with the Ivy League. He was also an extraordinary athlete and the captain of his school’s football team several years running. He also served in the Civil Air Patrol. Obviously military academies as well as all universities are looking for applicants who display leadership capabilities and potential. So his leadership in sports and in the Civil Air Patrol would have made him an attractive candidate. Additionally, physical fitness is a critical element of the military lifestyle, so his athletic skill undoubtedly contributed to his selection.
All this is to say: What resulted in his selection was not his political connections, tribal affiliation which equates in the vernacular of the United States, ethnicity, or his socioeconomic status. In fact, all of those factors are what the founding fathers of the United States would have dubbed, “the accident of birth.”
This makes me think of the MLK speech, I have a Dream, because Martin Luther King, Jr. tapped into something that is fundamentally American. He tapped into the idea that each of us is more than the sum of our social ties. We all have unique, intrinsic elements of our personalities that contributes to the content of our character.
So, I understand that my job as a parent is to help my daughter embrace and develop the specific knowledge, skills and abilities which come to her most naturally and which build for her an independent sense of herself. Her schools and instructors are important in so much as they support that goal, but the specific name on her transcripts isn’t what makes her special. It’s how she combines her experiences and understanding into a human being that transcends them.
35-Year Public Affairs & IT Professional 