by Malcolm Rivers, November 2015

As we gathered for another meeting to tell stories, share feelings, and take guidance, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the griping began. I had made the trek from my apartment in Northeast Washington, D.C., to Teach For America’s office on K Street. Bright posters beamed positive messages, chips and salsa were laid out in back, and hot pink flyers were strewn ­everywhere.

I looked around at my fellow Transition Team Leaders, Teach For America members chosen to introduce the newest class of recruits to life in the region. We had come into the program the year before and had volunteered to offer guidance and wisdom to fresh TFA recruits. There were nineteen of us, taken from the mostly female, white, ­highly ­educated, and upper-middle-class D.C. corps.

People filed in, harried and somber. The buzz of light banter hummed in the background and I slipped into a reverie. Only a few minutes passed before it was interrupted by a statement whose tone and content were all too familiar:

"There’s a lot they don’t get because they don’t get out of their neighborhoods enough. I think we need to teach them how to be tolerant. Like, I heard one of my kids talking about how being gay is, like, wrong. I explained to him that families look a lot of different ways and that none of them are better or worse than any others."

The speaker of these words didn’t have an ounce of prejudice in her twenty-three-year-old body. She was sure of it. I had met her a few months before and learned that she had attended American University, majored in political science, and came from a Virginia family of ample means and enlightened attitudes.

Another member of the group echoed her complaint.
“Yeah, some of my kids are pretty bigoted and think some really ignorant stuff.”
This one was educated at Duke, and she radiated an air of righteous outrage. Passionate in her declaration, she narrowed her eyes as she ­practically spat her rebuke. She turned left and right, her blonde hair swaying as she looked for affirmation from others at the table.
snip
Another one chimed in:
"A lot of them think that there’s something wrong with being gay and when I asked them about how they could think something like that, they try and say something about God or religion or something, it’s backward and . . ."

My peers were grumbling about the very people they had pledged to help, treating their students not as needy minds but as examples of backward social attitudes. Their condescension was shocking, though they still believed in their charitable motives.
This was not what I expected when I signed up for Teach for America that March.
snip
The students we worked with were failing, too. Several in my classes were reading two or three grade levels below the benchmark. Many struggled with spelling and writing in English and in their home languages. Their working vocabulary was limited, and it was clear that they had no reading habits outside of school. Few students were ready for abstract reasoning assignments; their minds were stuck on literal and common-sense planes.
snip
But in those training sessions, conversations routinely veered away from teaching practices and problems. Instead, we heard comments like this:

"I have to teach them that they can’t talk to people about people like that. They have to learn tolerance. Like, you can’t just tell someone that they can’t be gay or that being gay isn’t okay, that’s intolerant. That’s what I want my kids to learn."

It wasn’t her position that bothered me so much as its condescension. Her moral confidence made it seem as if the mission was to undo the backward culture of benighted youths. I had to wonder where my twenty-three-year-old peers not long out of college ever got the assurance to be so managerial. They certainly had no doubts about their fitness, and they didn’t hesitate to diagnose where the dysfunction had started.
"I think a lot of it comes from their home environment. No one teaches them how to look at the world or deal with people who are different."
snip
But it was hard to see why my colleagues seemed more concerned with correcting the flaws they perceived in students’ outlooks than they were with preparing them for secondary and higher education. The kids’ intolerance bothered them far more than their academic deficits. Our primary responsibility was to teach students the intellectual skills and attitudes to earn high grades, not to correct social taboos or endorse political viewpoints.
I talked to my fellow teachers about the academic progress of the kids, but more often than not they told me how badly they’d love to change who the students were, not what the students knew. Over the months, I watched their perspectives evolve from sympathy and concern to disgust and condescension.
snip
Unless we serve with the correct attitudes and aims, we too easily use our service to elevate ourselves. Service satisfies our ambitions and identities; those in need become tools, pawns for self-congratulation, accolades for our moral egos. As my peers sought to fix the cultures of the poor minority children they served, I ­noted the irony: Those who had argued most for tolerance of others became intolerant themselves.
snip
My judgmental colleagues finished their time with TFA and left for elite law schools and white-collar jobs in Manhattan. Their condescension to the poor students whom they pronounced narrow-minded and bigoted was consistent with the meritocratic outlook of the world that rewarded them so richly. They were on their way up, and they thought that their enlightened social outlooks proved their caritas. In practice, though, it was a way to look down on those beneath them.

What are we truly here to do? To serve. In order for service to be effective, the effort must hinge on an acknowledgment of our mutual humanity. We lift those up whom we have the courage to engage face to face. We empower not by standing above, expecting others to rise to our sophistication and moral height, but by humbling ourselves, taking on the aspect of a servant. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” Paul says. “Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” Adopt “the same mindset as Christ Jesus,” who “humbled himself / by becoming obedient to death— / even death on a cross!”

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/...ate-for-america