Later this week, I will begin a class on identity in the Middle East by asking the students to respond to a question which on the surface may seem simple but can also be very complicated. I will ask the students to list all of the ways they identify themselves. Go ahead-take a minute, pull out a piece of paper and a writing utensil and jot down all of your identifiers. I have done this activity before, and it's always been interesting to hear how teenagers in today's world choose to be identified.
I thought of this activity recently while reading Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. I came across the following passages, 'The sense of identity can make an important contribution to the strength and warmth of our relations with others, such as neighbors, or members of the same community, or fellow citizens, of followers of the same religion.Our focus on particular identities can enrich our bonds and make us do many things for each other and can help to take us beyond our self-centered lives...That understanding is important, but it has to be supplemented by a further recognition that a sense of identity can firmly exclude many people even as it warmly embraces others...The adversity of exclusion can be made to go hand in hand with the gifts of inclusion."
In an insightful and compelling argument, Sen focuses on the dangers of identifying oneself and others by only one element of our being. Sen shows how this reductionist approach can lead to conflict among and within a variety of groups, and he provides many examples of how doing so has led to warfare between countries. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in political science, history, current events, or sociology, and I am looking forward to using it in my classes.
However, the book can also be applied to the lives of adolescents as they navigate the process of identity formation. Beyond learning how to do well in their academic classes and how to perform in their many activities, including athletics and the arts, teenagers are consumed by the developmental appropriate process of learning who they are and figuring out what kind of people they want to be. They are literally discovering their person-hood. I think of the way that Michaelangelo described sculpture: he once explained that the statue was inside the block, and his job was to chop away at the extraneous stone that was weighing the body down and preventing it from showing its true self. Like that famous Renaissance artist, our students are constantly engaged in the process of trying to eliminate their superfluous exterior so they can get to the core of who they are.
However, they often demonstrate that they're going through this struggle by what they're wearing. I have often thought that this may be one of the reasons that dress can be so crucial for some adolescents, and as a result, why dress codes may carry such weight in their lives. What may look to us adults as students merely dressing differently from day to day may in fact be students trying on a variety of identities as represented by their outfits. If clothes make the man or woman, then an adolescent's sartorial selection announces to all of her peers who she is that day.
In order for students to be free to develop their identity, they must go to schools that allow this process to occur safely and without risk of ridicule or persecution. All too often, students feel imprisoned by the identity others have chosen for them, and they desperately wish to try something new or be someone else, but the conditions of their school will not allow them to do so. For all of the talk that schools are liberal places, the adults and students in them can be extremely conservative and not allow others to change. Perhaps this is also why it is so crucial that children be in diverse settings like Crossroads College Prep; children should find people like themselves in school, but they also must be exposed to people who differ from them so they can make as well-informed decisions as is possible.
Every autumn, we watch students return to school after a summer off desirous to change. The student who had a rough year academically wishes to do well; the student who never caused any trouble decides she wishes to be a little rebellious. While not allowing students to do anything that is either dangerous to themselves or harmful to others, the adults in schools must realize that these changes are not only appropriate but may be necessary for the student to find out who s/he truly is. It is up to us to create the conditions that will allow this to occur.
Many years ago, a student at Crossroads College Prep came to me as excited as I had ever seen her. She told me that she had discovered a quotation that she thought applied perfectly to the School; since then, we have printed that quote on the T-shirts we distribute to students we have admitted. It not only proclaims what we believe, but it also reinforces the kind of place we want to be. That quotation goes, "The best way to find out who you are is to go to the place where you don't have to be anyone else."
Imagine how much easier the lives of all adolescents could be if all of us in every school took that line to heart. As we begin another year of school, and our students are coming back, let's re-dedicate ourselves to empowering young men and young women to travel the path of finding out who they are and becoming the people they want to be. What greater gift could we give them?
