I’m one payment away from paying off my student loans. Well, half a payment.
I’m 45 years-old. I started college in 1998. It was a simpler time. Cell phones? Blogs? Civil catastrophe? There was no need for these things in 1998, kind reader. 1998 was baggy jeans, Thom Yorke, and caution being thrown to the wind.
Speaking of caution being thrown to the wind (writing of caution being thrown to the wind). My great-grandmother didn’t have money to help me with college. Dad didn’t have money to help me with college, despite the good folks at FAFSA suggesting he made too much money for me to qualify for student aid. I hadn’t save up any money despite working almost 40-hours a week at McDonalds and Subway during high school. So I threw my hands up in the air, threw caution to the wind, and signed up for student loans.
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It was worth it, by the way. Ignore the naysayers. Education matters. A college education matters.
We live in a time when schools and universities have the potential to offer tools to resist the ever-present threat of those with power and money using their power and money to keep their power and money. This is one of the reasons those with power and money would have you believe that schools and universities are bad places.
Some people worry that colleges and schools indoctrinate children. I’ve been a teacher and a professor for over twenty years. I had enough trouble getting students to sit in their desks or turn in assignments, let alone worry about whether or not they saw the world the same way that I did. They didn’t, by the way. Nobody sees the world in the same way. That’s one of the things I like about being a teacher and professor. Meeting and learning with people who are different than me.
Universities and schools offer spaces that can cultivate our critical capacities to better understand our world. Our worlds. Teaching and learning can help us understand what we are, what we’ve been, and what we might be. Teaching and learning can provide transformative spaces where we can become better to ourselves and each other. We encounter difference and are changed by that difference so that we know more than we knew before. And we do this in community with others.
Doesn’t that transformative potential seem important right now? As your phone screams at you. As your algorithm seethes. As your blood boils and the people with real power and real money profit off your boiling blood, your seething algorithms, and your screaming phones? I guess I don’t know if the transformative potential of teaching and learning seems important to you. It seems important to me. Important enough to me to make a career out of it.
Going to college at the University of Minnesota was a good thing for me to do. It was such a good thing that I did it three times. B.A., M.Ed, and PhD. I’m credentialed through and through. My college education hasn’t proved overly lucrative, but it has been such an important part of how I’ve learned to keep moving through the world. Keep transforming. Keep becoming more.
And now, over twenty years later, my college education is almost paid for.
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My son Solomon is in 6th grade. My son Samson is in 5th grade. We don’t have college funds setup for them. We don’t have much in the way of savings. My humble educator’s salary is just enough to pay the bills. To make payments on my student loans. To get by. There’s never really been enough to put away.
I can’t say for sure what college will look like when the boys are done with high school. I can’t say for sure how the boys will pay for college, but I do know I’ll help them if I can. I’m not sitting on any great wealth. Well, financial wealth. I’ve built all sorts of things as a teacher and learner in schools. And Kurt Vonnegut wrote that when you build something, your soul grows. My soul just keeps growing and growing. I’m not storing up my treasure here on Earth. Jesus said something about that. Teaching and learning and coming into encounters with difference have helped my soul grow. And I suppose that matters more to me than money. And I suppose that is the legacy I can provide for my children.
Thankfully, there’s no dollar amount on the worth of our souls. No loans needed.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 