I am currently working with a program by the name of UrbanPromise. For the past month I have been living and working in
One of the leaders that I quickly befriended while being in
Even now I see the holes in that statement. With looking at the environment that they live in I feel as if I rob them of opportunities…of dreams by saying that…I set limitations…I judge… that they won’t succeed….
Well my friend said something very encouraging to me. Since I have been here I have been in an awkward position thinking about what I should teach my students and then struggling with who am I to say that I know what they need to know. What he told me made me realize that there are some things I can learn from them but there are also certain things I can expose them to. Not necessarily saying that what I claim to “know” is right but more of opening the door to things that they would not have been exposed to and letting them make their own decisions…
From there I realized that maybe what we are given in life does not always determine where we can go and who we are…
As I continue to think about this I was wondering what your thoughts were. Do you disagree or agree with the statement that I made about people being the product of their environment?
Freedom♥
Kameale
2 comments:
I have been struggling a lot with this as well. In the end I have come to the conclusion that though an individual is affected by their context there are some individuals that are able to rise above their context and vice versa. I am not sure why some do and others don’t. We are very complicated beings and it is difficult to put our fingers on one or two factors.
Yeah, this is definatly a tough one. For me, just referring to people using the language of objects and industry (the word "product" and all the implications there) takes away from one's humanity and dignity. At the same time, it speaks volumes on the power of one's environment that it so clearly seems to "create" a person. But I agree with you, Kameale - ultimatly what we are given in life doesn't detirmine who we are. (Of course, I couldn't tell you what does detirmine "who we are" or what that even means.) And I agree with Matt - its confusing why some appear to overcome their circumstances and others do not. I don't know the answer to the question, but I think it's important to consider that if we say "people = environment" we deny our common humanity, we put everyone in a box, and we all become robots in a shitty, shitty world. At the same time, if we imagine that being a person means everyone has the same opportunities, abilities, decisions, etc. we further deny our humanity by imagining that we exist alone and abstractly, rather than in specific evironments and communities, which inherently exist in relation to one another.
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