House of Eratosthenes

I once saw a high school teacher lead a simple, powerful exercise to teach his class about privilege and social mobility. He started by giving each student a scrap piece of paper and asked them to crumple it up.

Then he moved the recycling bin to the front of the room.

He said, “The game is simple — you all represent the country’s population. And everyone in the country has a chance to become wealthy and move into the upper class.”

“To move into the upper class, all you must do is throw your wadded-up paper into the bin while sitting in your seat.”

The students in the back of the room immediately piped up, “This is unfair!” They could see the rows of students in front of them had a much better chance.

Everyone took their shots, and — as expected — most of the students in the front made it (but not all) and only a few students in the back of the room made it.

He concluded by saying, “The closer you were to the recycling bin, the better your odds. This is what privilege looks like. Did you notice how the only ones who complained about fairness were in the back of the room?”

“By contrast, people in the front of the room were less likely to be aware of the privilege they were born into. All they can see is 10 feet between them and their goal.”

“Your job — as students who are receiving an education — is to be aware of your privilege. And use this particular privilege called ‘education’ to do your best to achieve great things, all the while advocating for those in the rows behind you.”

Mkay, some questions first though. After all, this is supposed to be “education,” so questions should be a good thing…

This “advocating for,” what is that exactly? Is that picking up the crumpled up pieces of paper off the floor, carrying them to the bin and dropping them into it? Because that would be cheating, am I right?

Or is it manufacturing & placing more bins? As one of my current Facebook friends & former work colleagues pointed out, that would be something like capitalism…

Centralized government views its job as reducing the number of bins and move the one constantly according to what the Principal tells the teacher the needs of the class are based on last quarters bin report. The US Constitution allows more people to make more bins without much interference or guidance.

In fact, once you get out of the communist classroom setting, you’ll find one of those bins under every desk.

Probably not what the “communist” teacher had in mind.

A second question. The original article reports “most of the students in the front made it (but not all) and only a few students in the back of the room made it.” We can deduce from this statement that some of the students who made it were sitting a lot farther away from the bin compared to some of the students who missed, which would prove this “privilege” doesn’t decide everything. The mission is supposed to be one of education, education relies on communication.

If “privilege” is a real thing, then — and I maintain that it is — could there not be an opportunity for the underachieving to learn some things from those who met the challenge? It has been established that the dividing line between privileged & underprivileged, is not the same as the dividing line between the hits and the misses.

Which leads to yet a third question. Since some among the underprivileged did meet the challenge, and some among the privileged did fail the challenge, could it not be strongly ascertained that the point of this exercise is to pay closer attention to those who failed, as opposed to those who are underprivileged? The ramifications are significant. An “education” that involves a shift of attention toward those who fail, is bound to ultimately result in more failure. This would be the opposite of what the casual observer might have inferred from it, that the problem identified is all these crumpled papers missing the basket and we’re laboring toward a more sophisticated social model in which more crumpled papers find the intended target. You can’t get more success out of “teaching” people to ignore success and fixate themselves on failure.

Conclusion: A good place to resume this “lesson” from where the instructor left it, might be to pair up these “privileged” misses with the “underprivileged” hits, see if something can be done to improve the technique. Of course, in order for it to reflect real life, with some sort of market-based economic system in place, there would have to be a reflection of productivity. So a new bin for any student who manages to sink, let’s say, five in a row.

At the end of it all, it may be found that some among these budding “founders” managed to cross a respectable distance. This would do nothing to defeat the exercise of “education”; quite to the contrary, it would vividly illustrate the practical side of why we bother with it.

I wonder what the good professor would have done with the bold thinker who decided to haul his chair to the front of the room, sit down, and gently drop the wad of paper into the now-close bin.

My guess is that this would be ruled out of bounds – in other words, stifling innovation and creative decision-making. One wonders if the fellow back-seaters who didn’t move their chairs would be on the teacher’s side there, because the successful person “cheated.” That would be a discussion worth having.
- nightfly | 11/25/2014 @ 08:50
Good point.
- mkfreeberg | 11/25/2014 @ 10:52

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A Good (?) LessonTuesday, November 25th, 2014

A Good (?) Lesson
Tuesday, November 25th, 2014