One of the advantages of having footsteps to follow is that you always know where to step next. The disadvantage is that you’re always looking at the ground.
Students who are the first in their families to attend college understand this paradox well. They have more distance to cover, in some respects, than the students whose parents’ educational achievements helped their children imagine a larger life and identify a path to get there. Yet what is more liberating or empowering than breaking your own trail? In this issue, Terry Johnston shares the experiences of several of these “first-generation” students, whose eyes seem permanently fixed on the horizon.
I have a special affection for these stories. My dad, always at my urging, has occasionally recounted his serendipitous route to college, graduate school and a long career as a high school teacher. His life pivoted on one decision on a sultry summer day a few weeks out of high school in the late 1950s. His best friends were driving 100 miles to visit the closest university, then colloquially referred to as a “teacher’s college,” and asked him to tag along. He had never been on a college campus, and the idea of actually attending college was as remote a concept as going to the moon. He had lived his entire life on a scrappy patch of southern Iowa timberland in a two-room house with no running water or electricity. A person given to romantic notions of rural life might have described the place as nestled in a valley along a meandering creek. A sensible person, such as my mother (thankful to have avoided it) and anyone else who was there during mosquito season, would have described it as stuck in a swamp at the bottom of a hill.
Anyway, Dad discovered during his impromptu college visit that not only was he more than qualified as a student, he actually could afford it. (Tuition was $12.) He enrolled the same day.
If he hadn’t made that trip, he told me, he probably would have spent his life working at the local lumberyard. Not that that would have been terrible, either. But had his choices not included college, his talent would have been wasted, he would have married somebody else (if he’d married at all), and his children would have had different and perhaps fewer opportunities. College changed everything.
First-generation students today are better prepared academically and socially for the rigors of college than were those in my father’s day. Nevertheless, for some of them, the journey is not so different. They still arrive with tender perspectives and hungry minds, and depart having broadened the aperture of their experience to panorama-size. They are still the best reason I can think of to choose a career in higher education.
The old farmstead where Dad grew up is still in our family, abandoned, overgrown and, since the county stopped maintaining the road a few years back, even less accessible. We go back once a year, usually with the kids in tow, to poke around what’s left of the buildings and wander near the creek bed. The setting is beautiful at certain times of the year, and its spiritual hold on us is undeniable. But its bleak countenance is also a reminder of how far our family has come, and the transforming power of education.
Thank goodness Dad’s college-bound friends had an extra seat in their car.
