-Mitt Romney, January 2012
Mr. Romney's words serve as an ideal vehicle for introducing this topic that has been swishing around in my mind for many months. The terms "reality" and "real world" are used to excuse/exclude specific groups from participating in meaningful action. Anthropologists know that words such as these, used in broad social patterns, are clues to deciphering underlying cultural attitudes about power and status.
In my case, I've been paying close attention to the way in which "reality" and "real world" are used in school. Students, parents, educators and administrators use these terms as synonyms for or allusions to "adulthood," "work world," "professionalism," and "financial worries." When students turn in sloppy work, dress inappropriately for school, or arrive late to class, adults often chide them by saying something along the lines of, "You'll learn the hard way when you get into the real world," or "In the real world this would never fly!"
What troubles me about using "reality" in this way is the implicit message sent to everyone (students in particular) that what happens in school really doesn't really matter in the larger scheme of things. The colleagues I have had a the pleasure of laboring with over the past eight years work incredibly hard to ensure that our curriculum both matters and is applicable to real world situations that will serve our students in a number of ways. And yet, we sell ourselves short when we use the words "real world" in this way, entrenching in everyone's minds a series of deceptively oversimplified binaries: relevant and useless, empowered and powerless, center and periphery.
Also reinforced is the triad of life stages defined in U.S. culture: clearly defined childhood and adulthood, mediated by the shapeless in-betweenness of adolescence - the frustrating period of becoming that remains nebulous even two centuries after its debut.
The misuse of "real world" pains me further because in addition to giving both me and the youth I work with the appearance of being irrelevant, it also strengthens the resolve of many opponents of public education: one billionaire philanthropist declared schools completely irrelevant several years ago, then proceeded to prescribe that schools be re-designed to work more like businesses. In this election year, not a single major candidate (including the incumbent) espouses policies that express a modicum of faith in public schools or that represent dialogue with the women and men entrusted to ensure that the next generation understand the workings of democracy.
By compressing "reality" into a reduced set of definitions, other hardworking persons (outside of schools, but too many to enumerate here) are suddenly relegated to meaninglessness.
And the slope becomes terminally slippery when all of a sudden, not even years of civic service or political labor count as "real world" experience. Mr. Romney's attempt to further collapse reality into so narrow a definition alarms so few because, culturally, most Americans are already comfortable with denying the value of activities that aren't directly connected to producing a monetary profit.
As ridiculous as proclaiming, "red is the only real color."
