Essentials of Knowing Your Potential
Lorena, Myles Horton, and Calderon believe their jobs as human beings is to know your potential and do something that will impact your life in a good way. The idea “if knowing your potential is always a difficult concept to comprehend, and Lorena’s story shows that. She grew up in difficult circumstances. She not only had family issues but financial and legal issues as well that always had the ability to degrade her and make her feel as if she was not able to do anything because of the status she was born in, but she was able to use the hard moments and find the mindset into getting an MD and making a difference in other people’s lives. Not only this but all stories have this same mindset. Myles Horton states, “People have a potential for growth; it’s inside, it’s in the seeds. This kind of potential cannot guarantee a particular outcome, but it’s what you build on.” (Islands of Decency p.133). Not only this, but a large factor in knowing your potential that all stories talk about is the importance of education in knowing yourself. Many of them claim on the idea that “if we faculty engage both ourselves and our students in perspective-taking as a component of empowering education, we can use our classrooms to practice creating an equitable democratic society.” (Perspective-Taking as a Tool for Building Democratic Societies p.2). These stories use real-life experiences and advice to inspire students and their audience that change comes from us, in classrooms or anywhere, we just have to know that we have the ability to make that change.
The social issues that Lorena, Horton, and Calderon are engaged with are social inequality, work and occupations, social structure, poverty, hunger, immigration, and racism. All three came from Mexico to the United States where they faced a lot of social issues that they used to grow from. A major problem that they had was fitting into the educational system and finding fairness within the society. “ When I came to the United States from Mexico with my parents as a seven-year-old child, I did not fit into my “English only” school system.” (Perspective-Taking as a Tool for Building Democratic Societies p.1). They see the problems and causes of their life experiences and fight for a way to change them. Lorena was able to intern and see first hand what marginalized people go through. She not only saw her mother and stepfather work hard at the farm, but she interned and saw other marginalized people working hard and she hopes one day she can fight and help them in the best way she knows how. She used her experiences to educate herself and find a passion to fight for that will make a difference in her life and others.
Lorena dwells on the idea of education changing the democracy issues and being an aid to her having credibility in the eyes of others. She has had so much experience and hardships in her education, from not even speaking English when she first entered school to balancing classes with work schedule, but she still sees it as a tool for her to get to her full potential no matter the difficulties it handed to her. She even plans to apply for medical school so she can open up her own mobile clinic. They use the idea of how education gives credibility in your name which makes more of an impact. I have experienced the idea of how education is a tool for myself to get a job but also make an impact and change society today. This idea interests me on how I can use this class to make a difference in any social issue, especially through service-learning.
