Meeting Al Jazeera, Meeting Myself

During senior year of high school we had guest speakers come into class for a week to share about their path to success. One day, the principle came in and gave a talk about how running a school is like running a business. She referred to us as numbers, as test scores that needed to add up and together average to something higher than our competition. Her tone, body language, and approach to leadership was detached and cold… focused on nothing more than the type of success that could be seen on paper, willingly leaving quality of education behind so long as SAT scores were all in the top 95 percentile.

I was so brainwashed by this “teaching” method that I didn’t realize that there was any other until I reached college. I was in for a rude awakening, or really, more of an enlightenment, when I got to Grinnell. I remember my first semester there, completely dumbfounded by the fact that there was no competition, no sense of urgency, failure, or superiority to motivate me to do better. In fact, I even considered transferring because it was all “too easy”.

Then for convocation one day, I sat in on a sociological talk by some lady from BU, talking about the difference between quantitative and qualitative learning. She discussed how higher education has become more geared towards promoting research because that earns the institution more grants, and more grants allow it to expand, thus allowing the school the greater prestige needed to attract better students. It all sounded awfully familiar—one could argue, almost parallel to my experience in high school, except instead of research, the quantitative learning back then was preparing for standardized tests. Her overall message was the basic “we need to learn to learn, not learn to perform” spiel, one that has become quite familiar to me now that I’ve spent more time in Grinnell. Crazy thing, ever since then when I started to actually try to learn for the sake of learning and not just for the grade, Grinnell has gotten substantially more challenging and rewarding.

Two Fridays ago, we (the Iraqi exchange program) went to Al Jazeera—a trip that the students were especially excited about. They went with many questions and, arguably, accusations, in mind. The meeting started off like all other visits to the myriad of organizations we had met: we as facilitators of the group awkwardly sign in a group of twenty-six at the front desk, cram as many people in elevators as possible to minimize the number of trips needed to be taken, and constantly shush and remind that, “we’re in an office—people are working. Stop talking!” Sitting in a room with far too few chairs for our visiting group, the guest speaker for the day comes in, hands out cool gift bags, says their spiel, and then asks for questions and comments.

This time, however, hands shot up in the air before the speaker even finished opening the floor to questions. The students fired question after question to the spokesman, leaving no room for a lull in their brutal attack. All were frank and uninhibited in their questions, asking things like how this news company can lie to the public. Others wanted to know the intention behind why Al Jazeera created the divide between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. Some gave anecdotes about misreporting—one about how her father was interviewed and then without grounds labeled a Sunni based solely on the sound clip Al Jazeera used from him. The spokesman did his best to answer these accusatory questions, though at best, his responses were flailing.

In the end, the spokesman somehow calmed the wildfire of assaults by concluding that at the end of the day, his job as a reporter is just a job. Al Jazeera is just a business. Most students walked out fairly satisfied with that conclusion, even repeating his statements in our debriefing session. A few other students, mostly the ones who were fairly soft spoken during the q&a session, were unsatisfied with the responses given—much like myself. Unfortunately other than one or two cases, these participants continued to remain quiet and didn’t choose to openly share the logic behind their discontent.

I cannot decide whom I am more upset with: leaders, society, or myself. The leaders of today have stolen our humanity by turning us into statistics and tricking us into believing that it is okay to be this way. But at the same time, this type of “success” sought after by my old principle or by the spokesman at Al Jazeera, is something that society has defined—and hopefully, something they only follow because that seems like the only path for them. Or perhaps we as people are the ones to blame for letting society get to be this way. What is most upsetting, however, is undeniably the fact that I have created these three divisions in my head as if the people, the leaders, and society are not all one and not all equally as responsible.