How We Teach: Individualist Stories

I'm sorry if this one is dense! Rarely do I feel like I really need more than four minutes, but this time I did!! Two things I've been thinking about:

1. When I say that shared worldviews and knowledge helps us communicate and work together, I don't mean that we CANNOT work together without shared stories...obviously we can! I just think that education provides us with shared knowledge that allows us to work together more effectively. I honestly think this is one of the main benefits of college education...just giving people shared frames to simplify communication. Which, of course, is terrible when higher education is denied to people who can't afford the ludicrous costs and then people are like, "There's just some reason why it's a little harder to work with people who didn't go to college" or, worse, "This person doesn't know about X or Y thing and so they must be stupid" when, actually, they just didn't get the EXACT SAME education as you, asshole. We need to get better at working with people who do not have shared frames, and that should be part of education.

2. Being the kind of person for whom barriers to success were basically non-existent does NOT mean that success is guaranteed. Both luck and hard work are necessary even when there are no barriers. But the absence of a barrier is not the same thing as luck for me. To me, luck is writing a Harry Potter song that got me invited to a Harry Potter convention that resulted in me meeting a conference organizer who helped me build VidCon. Luck is not being born with enough money in the bank that I never had student loans...while almost all of my peers did have student loans. That's structural inequality. I think getting confused about that can lead to a lot of successful people thinking that, just because they had to work hard AND get lucky, that anyone on earth could have had the same outcome with the same luck and hard work.

3. Oh, and also, turns out there were three. Success is arbitrary and it is what you decide it is and individualist narratives are also narratives that re-inforce a very specific thing as the best possible outcome. While many people find a great deal of satisfaction in lives that won't be written into books AND THEY SHOULD.
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