Nicholas Suen
Christopher Hiura
Angie Zhang
Theme: Marginalization and Miseducation
In Kaozong N. Mouavangsou’s article “Hmong Does Not Mean Free: The Miseducation of Hmong Americans,” she accuses the United States educational system of being responsible for the marginalization of the Hmong community through misrepresentation of historical events and the creation of intra-community divisions. Mouavangsou believes “The educational system is constructed to foster the perception that America is great... at the expense of devaluing other cultures.”(2017)
According to Mouavangsou, the U.S. education system creates intra-community divisions through isolation of higher performing Hmong students from the lower performing ones. This results in a questioning of identity within Hmong students, and also reinforces stereotypes about Hmong males in academics. By isolating a small number of Hmong students in higher performing classes, a message is sent to the students, that “...in order to be academically successful, a student needs to be more American and to stay away from other Hmong boys, therefore dividing the Hmong community.”(2017) Hmong males believe they must separate themselves from members of their own ethnic community that are lower performing students, in order to be successful. This causes Hmong students, particularly males to avoid lower academically performing members of their community in order to promote a better educational environment for their development. This cultural divide also contributes to the Americanization of Hmong students because, according to Mouavangsou, they believe that academic success requires them to be more American, and less connected to their Hmong community.
Miseducation, or the misrepresentation of facts is an issue that plagues multimedia and contributes to the ignorance and misinformation of the public. An example for U.S. citizens, that is brought up internationally especially often is the omittance of U.S. antagonism in the Middle East. I believe that it is common for U.S. citizens to believe that hatred towards the U.S. is unwarranted by those with negative opinions of this country. However, it can be argued that this perception is affected by the omittance of U.S. involvement in sometimes violent episodes in countries containing a strong presence of Anti-U.S. sentiment groups, with ISIS being a primary example. For example, a well known international blog called “The Intercept_” reported on a recent airstrike attack on a crowded marketplace and school that was believed to be associated with members of ISIS. (2017) This is a small example of unfavorable news relating to the U.S. being omitted and ignored by major news networks and institutions in the United States. This form of miseducation eliminates any forms of evidence of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, causing many citizens to believe that any terrorist attack by groups such as ISIS as unwarranted and without reason.
Nick’s Story
In her analysis of the U.S. education system in relation to the Hmong community, Mouavangsou claims that the separation of Hmong males based on their academic performance promotes division within the Hmong community while also reinforcing gender-based stereotypes. I found her take on detrimental impact associated with isolating higher performing Hmong students from the lesser performing majority very interesting, particularly because it is related to my own educational past. From elementary to middle school, I was a part of a large program called the “Gifted & Talented Education” program. The California GATE program allocates state funding for the development of “...unique education opportunities for high-achieving and underachieving pupils” (2005). Despite being placed in GATE classes, I was under the impression that there wasn’t a real difference between GATE and non-GATE students, until the 7th grade.
My middle school tried to keep cohorts of students more or less together throughout their varying schedules, so most of my classes consisted of a lot of the same students. We were told at the beginning of the year that our cohort was a mixture of GATE and non-GATE students, something that I did not consider worth thinking about at the time. However, throughout the term I began recognizing slight differences in my classes from the year before. For one, the demographic of the classes I was in consisted of considerably more Latin-American students, a fairly prominent ethnic group in my school. During the year, I found that there were a lot more disruptive and noncompliant students (not confined to any one ethnic group). I noticed that I was getting annoyed more easily in my classes, especially when students would show absolutely no interest in the class subjects while also maintaining a rebellious mentality that resulted in them not even trying to participate or understand what was going on. Being in this mixed class made me realize that throughout my educational career up to that point, I was surrounded by a particular type of peers. No one is especially “gifted” or “talented” rather, it’s just there are students that just generally cared or even tried while in school.
The concept of separating students based on academic performance brings forward a lot of questions, especially those associated with the development of academic class hierarchies. Is it detrimental for lower performing students to be surrounded by others who also do not perform well in school? Would it be fair to mix students of all performance levels, thereby impacting the educational environment for higher performing students with others that do not dedicate the same amount of dedication to their school work? I can easily see this separation of academic levels becoming increasingly detrimental for those in the lower performing environment.
Mouavangsou’s article also claims that non-Hmong scholars in the United States provide students with a very limited amount, if not false, information about the culture of the Hmong, resulting in a handful of people, in California alone, who do not have the slightest knowledge of the existence of the Hmong community. For instance, the article mentions that students are falsely taught that the Hmong community are illiterate based on the fact they do not have their own country. As a matter of fact, the author herself revealed that she was taught to think this was true ever since elementary school. She writes, “According to the formal education I had received and books I had read, I was correct to say that Hmong have no written language, and no country; however, according to our own cultural knowledge, I was wrong.”(2017) The cultural material that is taught to the students also lacks important context and reasoning as it leaves students questioning the Hmong culture. Mouavangsou mentions the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, And the Collision of Two Cultures written by Anne Fadiman in 1997, which very vaguely touched upon the Hmong medicinal practice of sacrificing animals for healing without any other context. This information when read by others who are not familiar with the Hmong would easily come across as bizarre and confusing as the author does not make an effort to expose the readers to the fact that “such sacrifices are seen by some Hmong as healing,” and why they have that specific belief. (2017) By not doing so, it seems as though the U.S. is promoting the questioning of the Hmong culture because it does not comply with the western medicinal norms.
Angie’s Story
Reflecting upon Mouavangsou’s article, I am reminded that during my middle school days, my teachers also had not spent a sufficient amount of time lecturing on the history and culture of many Asian American ethnic groups, specifically the Chinese. I distinctly remember my teacher planning out exciting activities such as jeopardy and debates while lecturing about U.S. history in an attempt to keep students engaged on the topics covered, and then spending only a couple days lecturing on Ancient China, despite it being one of the longest lasting empires in history, not to mention their most famous inventions such as paper money and the compass that we still use today. He also spent those days lecturing without organizing any interactive activities whatsoever which, as you may have guessed, led to many students becoming uninterested in the topics and falling asleep in class. His way of teaching proved to be an indirect way of labeling Chinese history as unimportant and belittling their culture and traditions as he had practically convinced the class into thinking that it was an insignificant subject.
Mouavangsou wrote about how she continually struggled with her seemingly contradicting identities--a contradiction between her internalized American culture and her Hmong heritage as a woman. As said before, Mouavangsou’s perception of the Hmong experience was essentially veiled by the miseducation of America’s education system, where, though she was told working hard equates to happiness, in reality life as a minority is much more complicated than that. At school, in “white-American” culture, she was made to believe that everyone, no matter race or gender, is born equal with equal opportunities; however, when back home, she is contradicted with a different reality of a “patriarchal male-centered world”. She describes how she saw her brothers as superior and more valued than her--that they were the privileged ones whereas she was the disadvantaged one. This led to an inferiority complex, where she felt the need to prove herself over her brothers via excellence in school. To her, academic success wasn’t solely financial success, but a pursuit in validation (both from Hmong and American culture) and for a sense of agency. Unfortunately, that academic success had a hidden poison, a poison of deficit thinking of Hmong culture. As mentioned before, she always thought that Hmong people had “no language or culture of their own” creating a sense of inferiority compared to people (especially whites) who weren’t Hmong. In this way, the American educational system, by misrepresenting or omitting certain histories, effectively achieve victim blaming, where “America is the hero that saved them.” Until she realized the fact that she unknowingly internalized oppression, Mouavangsou struggled with what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the contradiction of double aims.” This contradiction is defined by the struggle to appease conflicting sides of a system a person is part of; in this case, Mouavangsou was trying to be successful in both America’s definition of success and her own Hmong culture’s definition of success. The struggle is paradoxical and painfully endless; it creates a feeling of otherness and alienation. Fortunately she realizes this struggle, and addresses it in her own way.
References:
- Program Information. (2005). Retrieved October 08, 2017, from http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/gt/gt/index.asp
- W.E.B. Du Bois. The Soul of Black Folk. Toronto: Dover Publications, 1994.
- Hussain, M. (2017, September 25). Dozens of Civilians Killed When U.S. Bombed a School And a Market in Syria. Retrieved October 08, 2017, from https://theintercept.com/2017/09/25/syria-us-airstrike-civilian-death-hrw-tabqa/
- Mouavangsou, K.N. 2016. Hmong Does Not Mean Free: The Miseducation of Hmong Americans. Retrieved October 7, 2017.
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