Our Jobs As Human Beings

What?

Lorena (Sabrina Needs Her Identity Back) believes her job as a human being is to educate the people who require it. Throughout Lorena’s story, her surprise at the way undocumented immigrants are treated by the people employing them is extremely evident. Illegally crossing the Mexico/US border herself, she felt a connection to these people. She felt that if she could educate these people the way she had been educated by the people around her and her herself, she had done her job as a human being. Lorena herself says that she “wanted to give them the knowledge to defend themselves with” (194) in the hopes that they would be treated with more fairness if they could show they knew what treatment was unfair.

Myles Horton (Islands of Decency) believes his job as a human being is, much like Lorena, is to educate people who require it, but in a slightly different way. ThroughoutIslands of Decency, Myles Horton’s emphasis on growth is evident from the beginning when he speaks of his view of the educative process. To him, the point of educating others is to help them grow. He believes that to learn, we can’t look for the missing information — the missing information is already in front of us. We shouldn’t be taking things apart to try and understand them, but rather looking at things as a whole and understanding it as such. In describing what his job as a human being is, Myles Horton states it is “to provide opportunities for people to grow (not to make them grow, because no one can do that), to provide a climate which nurtures the islands of decency, where people can learn in such a way that they continue to grow.”

So What?

The social issues that Lorena/Sabrina is engaged with are immigration, specifically the treatment of undocumented immigrants. Within Sabrina Needs Her Identity Back, Lorena speaks about the many ways the organization she worked with would help immigrants (legal or illegal). An example of the things they would do to help fight for immigrants is the boycotting of companies like Taco Bell and stores like Mount Olive Pickles for the raise in salary for the workers and pickers of their food. The organization itself also directly worked with the workers and pickers, sometimes doing food drives to support the workers and their families. Lorena said the organization was especially helpful in knowing “where to send you if you had legal trouble, if your boss was being bad to you, or if you needed food.” (192)

The issues of immigration and the treatment of undocumented immigrants is especially important to her identity and sense of meaning because she herself came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant, crossing the border twice, being unsuccessful the first time. She understood firsthand what it meant to be an undocumented immigrant and the challenges they are faced with and wanted to make a change. She herself had been lucky enough to know someone to live as and be given a better opportunity that way, but not everyone could always be so lucky. She speaks of how it felt to secretly be undocumented, saying “I’m very proud of being Mexican, but being Mexican now is almost taboo.” (198) As one of the lucky ones, Lorena stated that her times interning with her organization allowed her to “open my eyes to a lot of injustice that I didn’t want to know before.” (193)

The social issues that Myles Horton is engaged with are the “struggles in the South over the last fifty-five years,” (138) specifically civil rights. Highlander was described by Horton as a tapestry made of many different colors. Over time, some colors became more prominent than others, some disappeared and reappeared, new colors come into play, the colors themselves would change shapes and become bigger or smaller, but no matter what, they all blended together “based on a love for humanity and trust in the ability of people to control their own lives eventually.” (134) Myles Horton’s personal mission is to teach people how to make decisions for themselves, and that is clearly seen throughout all of Islands of Decency. His goal isn’t to teach people how to act, but to teach people to act and do things for themselves.

These issues are important to Myles Horton’s identity and sense of meaning because he created Highlander from how passionate he was about these social issues. Myles Horton’s passion for education and educating is what made him create Highlander: to educate, and even to learn how to educate. When they first started Highlander, they realized that the way they were teaching wasn’t getting things done the way they wanted to. Horton, feeling as strongly as he does about education, realized they had to take everything they knew and were taught about how to educate people, throw it away, and start over. He realized the way they were teaching weren’t allowing them to “reach the people” (140) and so instead decided to learn from the people who came there to learn, and teach newcomers based off of what they were able to learn from them. It wasn’t the usual educative system of a teacher and student; everyone was a teacher and everyone was a student.

Now What?

While reading Sabrina Needs Her Identity Backand Islands of Decency,it is made clear just how important education is to both Lorena/Sabrina and Myles Horton. The last paragraph of Sabrina Needs Her Identity Back, Lorena speaks one last time about her experience coming from Mexico to America. After coming all the way to America, going through everything she went through, she still was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to school, so “why not go all the way?” (202) In Islands of Decency, Myles Horton speaks on the importance of learning how to act for yourself and what you believe in. People in turn can learn to do the same by watching others do it. Because many people learn that way, Horton says “we learn to make decisions by making decisions.” (142) Essentially, the best way to learn is to do.

Personally, I see the connection between education, taking a stance, and striving to make the world better for all is each individual person. If one wants an education, wants to take a stance, and wants to make the world a better place, they will. I definitely think it is happening in my own education, and this Service Learning class is a prime example of that. In talking to my friends at other universities and colleges, I realized that Dominican was the only school that requires a Service Learning class to engage with our own community. It made me realize that Dominican truly is the best school for me because it allows me to make the connection between education, taking a stance, and striving to make the world a better place.