Alternative Education

by Abigail Carl-Klassen

 “You’re going to school?” he scoffed, overhearing the word high school. 

He clenched the steering wheel as we sat in the 1990 Chevy Lumina van, back windows forced open with PVC, the exhaust from all the other cars hoping to cross back into El Paso from Juarez sinking in around us. Abe, his wife Mary, and their daughter Leah, my best friend, travelled the four and a half hours to Juarez for doctor visits and cheap medications once a month. Over the years I went with them more times than I can remember.

“Well, I went to school too—the school of hard knocks,” he grumbled into the rearview mirror. When I said nothing, he turned his attention to the young man scrubbing the windshield with a dirty rag and promptly turned on the windshield wipers.

In his mind, at fourteen I was best suited for hard work and, in a couple of years, a husband. That evening when we were alone, Leah—who had left school the year before, after finishing the eighth grade, to work as a secretary in her father’s well-drilling business— approached me, eyes low, and said, “Don’t listen to him. He’s just a grumpy old man.” 

His moods, mere shadows of what they were twenty-one years before, when he was an alcoholic (“I was a drunk. I am an alcoholic. That’s why they call it alcoholism, not alcoholwasm,” he would always say, correcting us), were still unpredictable, and I knew that. And I knew that in a few hours he would slap us on the back, laughing at some ridiculous joke. An old man joke, the kind that was only funny because he wheezed and snorted when he laughed. Because we laughed at him, not with him. Sometimes I still feel guilty.

I did not question him—his fourth-grade education in a Mennonite colonia in Mexico, his conversion to Pentecostalism that left him strict but sober. His unrelenting willfulness and stubbornness that allowed him to survive as the youngest of nine children in an abusive family. He made sense. What didn’t make sense was my own education. “Yeah,” I thought, “high school is important, but what about the school of hard knocks?” 

As far back as I can remember I had been told by my parents—high school teachers and Bootstrap University graduates themselves—that I was going to college. Though I grew up in a county where the sale of alcohol was prohibited and church was the primary social activity (besides getting completely wasted in a caliche pit), my parents were not religious people. The Baptists and Church of Christ preached fervently against dancing, the Methodists said everything in moderation, the Mennonites fought with each other about what was considered worldly, and the Catholics and Holy Rollers danced, one in the flesh, the other in Spirit, but as for our house, we worshipped education.  

My parents grew up in the Midwest during the steel strikes and riots of the 1970s and fled the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt in the early 1980s. My dad’s father was a “mill rat” while his mother raised five children in a fog that we now know as postpartum depression. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t meet her father until she was in her twenties after having been raised by a single mother with schizophrenia. My family legacy, together with the fact that I was the daughter of government employees in a blue-collar community where illiteracy was not uncommon, reinforced my understanding from an early age that I was in a position of privilege. Education, my parents maintained, made all the difference. 

My friends’ fathers were truck drivers, oil-field hands, farm laborers, and carpenters, and their mothers were homemakers or worked long hours as home health aides, LVNs, gas-station attendants, Walmart associates, and as maids and school janitors. Their kitchens became like holy places to me, places not only of love but also of education.

Around their tables is where I learned the words “WIC,” “CHIP,” “free and reduced lunch,” and “Indigent Adult Medical Coverage Program.” We ate red and green birthday cake in July made from expired mix with Christmas trees on the box donated by the grocery store to the local food bank. While we ate, drank, and laughed, one of the favorite topics of conversation was rich people who didn’t know how to do shit. Lawyers who left their dirty underwear in their dry cleaning. Foremen who didn’t know how to hook up jumper cables. Doctors who didn’t know how to put on a sling. Bankers who insisted that their maids roll up the Persian rugs before dinner parties so they wouldn’t be stolen. Teachers who—well, they never said anything, at least in front of me, about teachers.

In the summers when I was a teenager many of my friends worked hoeing cotton with their families, and later, after they turned sixteen, they got jobs on spraying crews. They said they probably could hook me up if I wanted to come with them. They knew somebody who could talk to someone else who could talk to the boss. I asked my parents, but they said I couldn’t because the work was dangerous. I think they were ashamed that I wanted to work in the fields after all their hard work and education.

Sometimes at night I lay awake, afraid that I would grow up and not be able to do shit. 

But before my insomnia and the incident on the border, I sat in an assembly at Seminole Junior High, in my hometown, Seminole, Texas, population 6,000. We squirmed in the oversized auditorium seats because we were about to register for our middle school electives, which meant that after the summer was over we would practically be adults. But before we could mark an X on choir, band, or art, we had to listen to a bald, thick, administrative type talk to us about success and education. He launched into some platitudes about us becoming “young men and young women” and “thinking about the future.” I don’t remember much else because after his introduction he made a comment that still ranks high on my list of most ignorant statements I have ever heard, even after all these years. 

“Success,” he bellowed, before pausing for dramatic effect, “isn’t just something that you fall into. You have to work for it. As a matter of fact, you can tell who has been successful just by driving around town and looking at people’s houses.”

I was ten years old and I already knew it was bullshit. 

I slunk down in my retractable chair, narrowed my eyes, and crossed my arms across my chest. Who was this over-educated asshole, who probably didn’t know how to turn off the water when his toilet was overflowing, telling my friends that their parents were unsuccessful? Thus began my contentious lifelong relationship with authority and institutions—my activist education.

Now, a substitute teacher in El Paso, I sometimes walk into a classroom only to be greeted by a poster that showcases several luxury cars parked in front of a mansion with the caption “Justification for Higher Education” plastered across the top. The same poster that hung in my classrooms growing up. Each time I see it I want to rip it up ceremoniously and give students, teachers, and anyone else in the immediate vicinity an education that they didn’t ask for. But, the bell rings, I look into the spectacled eyes of an owl perched beside the chalkboard over a placard that reads “There’s no substitute for a great teacher,” and I know my place.

Some days when I sub, students stab each other in the face with needles, throw rocks at windows, and get up in my face and ask, “What are you going to do about it, bitch?”, giving me an education that isn’t pleasant but that I still want…most days. Growing up middle-class makes me shrink back sometimes, but dammit, I press on. I know my blood is lined with white trash women who can survive! I find the ability to go back to the classroom again and again when I am able to make a connection, an enemy, a friend, and sit down together to talk, to laugh, and to listen.

Last week I subbed at a GED center for students on probation. When I asked the room monitor if the teacher had left anything for the students, he pointed to a table of sixteen-year-olds with buzzed heads and white T-shirts and said, “These gentlemen have been socializing instead of doing anything productive. You can sit down if you want to hear about the gang life—who jumped who, who got busted by the police, and what party was the best. But, you know,” he sighed into his newspaper, “it’s whatever you want.”

I looked back at him and laughed, “Maybe I can get educated, right?” 

He smiled, shook his head, and returned to the morning’s headline: “Nine More Dead in Juarez.” I grabbed a social studies binder and pulled up a chair next to the boys.

I’ve come to understand that the most important moments in my life, the ones that shaped my values, my goals, and my day-to-day decisions, seemed to be about getting the education that I missed. The education that my parents tried to shelter me from but inadvertently propelled me toward. I can’t stop knocking on the door of the school of hard knocks. To see if I can make sense of what I see around me and to ask if I’m seeing the right things. To see if I can find my mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, aunts and uncles. To see if I can find my friends who stayed behind when I went to college. To see if I can find my friends (Leah among them) who said, “Fuck this shit, I’m going to college.” To see if I can find everybody who never came back and everybody who never left somewhere inside.