The contemporary discourses surrounding education would overwhelmingly represent it in terms
of access. Pervading the country’s educational infrastructure are heated and often partisan
debates on affirmative action policies, of undocumented immigrant enrollment in public
universities, of campus diversity, of tuition and cost spikes, and the list goes on infinitely.
Access, as far as we currently understand it, is fundamentally undervalued and under-applied.
Sure, the term makes obvious references to, for example, a low or middle class student’s access
to an expensive private college or to a minority student’s equal opportunity in gaining admission
to an elite, white-dominated university. Access goes much deeper, though. An entirely new
ontology in describing it is necessary if we, as a society, are to converge its contemporary
definition with our contemporary values.
The notion that a quality education is a vital precursor to an equally-quality professional career
and well-being isn’t new. Since the American obsession with joining the economic legacy of the
Industrial Revolution, the ranks of human capital became unabashedly mechanized. And
consequently, so did education, and problematically so. Educational institutions began favoring
the fields of study that were seen as ensuring a successful job and salary– the hard sciences,
mathematics, engineering. Mechanization has transformed education into a commodity, and its
access has become limited only to those who have the means to obtain it.
But the tides in education are turning, and the waves are being stirred by the very students who
are now using education as/for change. In post-industrial America, information, communication,
and ideas are, again, important. The humanities and social sciences are becoming significant to
the increasingly networked and globalized world and to our reinvigorated desires in
understanding it. Digital technology and evolving cultural identity are creating new, innovative
connections among people of rich and diverse identities in the dialogical public sphere.
Those connections often start in the classroom, and the classroom starts with and becomes alive
by knowledge and learning. Even out of the classroom, all people have access to the knowledge
and learning of their own personal narratives that make an education empowering them
worthwhile. The newest generation of American voices will be one that demands we put those
experiences back in the classroom and that we dedicate ourselves to supporting them. We must
demand our classrooms and educational institutions be the most possibly accessible, incessantly
striving for an education of inclusion.
