Lives On The Boundary

“English A students vex universities like UCLA. By the various criteria the institutions use, the students deserve admission—have earned their way—but they are considered marginal, ‘high risk’ or ‘at risk’ in current administrative parlance. ‘The truly illiterate among us,’ was how one dean described them.”

Here, Rose defines the large subcategory of learners that are being left behind by the education system. The students Rose focuses on in his book are labeled “at risk,” meaning they are more likely to fail out of or experience increased difficulty in school. But Rose’s last sentence shows something else, too: the labels the system places on these students carry a stigma that hurts, rather than helps, students.

“The back-to-back basics movement got a lot of press, fueled as it was by fears of growing illiteracy and cultural demise. The movement raked in all sorts of evidence of decline: test scores, snippets of misspelled prose, enrollments in remedial courses in our finest schools. […] The back-to-basics advocates suggested—and many university faculty members solemnly agreed—that what was needed here was a return to the fundamentals: drills on parts of speech, grammar, rules of punctuation, spelling, usage.”

Rose identifies the back-to-basics educational movement as one of the things that contributes to the marginalization of at-risk students. In this quote, he defines and contextualizes the movement for readers so that his later criticism of it makes sense.

“‘The schools,’ write social historians David Cohen and Barbara Neufeld, ‘are a great theater in which we play out [the] conflicts of culture.’ And it’s our cultural fears […] that weave into our assessments of literacy and scholastic achievement. The fact is that the literacy crisis has been with us for some time, that our schools have always been populated with students who don’t meet some academic standard.”

Rose does two important things in this quotation. First, he argues that the literacy crisis—or the perceived rising rate of illiteracy in America—is not new. Secondly, he argues that discussions of illiteracy are tinged with fear because society connects literacy rates to cultural success. In other words, a rise in illiteracy triggers fears that American society is backsliding or eroding. Thus, America’s education system serves as a barometer for understanding social problems and gauging the success of American culture as a whole.

“Vocational education has aimed at increasing the economic opportunities of students who do not do well in our schools. […] The vocational track, however, is most often a place for those who are just not making it, a dumping ground for the disaffected.”

Rose defines the term “vocational education” for readers as a set of courses designed to serve underperforming students by teaching the basics while preparing students for the workforce. Rose also uses this short passage to challenge the accepted definition of vocational education. Rose explains that in reality, vocational education is a convenient place to abandon students who are too much work for regular classrooms, and the poor education they receive affects students for the rest of their lives. Rose’s use of the negative term “dumping ground” contrasts with the definition he provides for “vocational education” in the first sentence, which helps readers better understand the ugly reality of the program.

“[MacFarland] gave me a way to feel special by using my mind. And he provided a role model that wasn’t shaped on physical prowess alone, and something inside me that I wasn’t quite aware of responded to that.”

Up until this point, Rose has fallen through the cracks in the educational system. Never a fantastic student, being stuck in vocational education has put him further behind, and even after he is transferred into regular classes, the gaps in his education make every school day a struggle. But Rose’s English teacher, Jack MacFarland, changes everything. He brings a different kind of teaching technique into the Mercy High classroom that challenges his students while engaging them. MacFarland rekindles Rose’s love of reading and becomes Rose’s role model, which is especially impactful since Rose’s father has recently passed away. MacFarland gives Rose a different picture of success that transcends what he has seen growing up in poverty on South Vermont Street, and he gives Rose confidence in his own intelligence and potential.

“I don’t know what I would have found if the flow of events hadn’t changed dramatically. Two things happened. Jack MacFarland privately influenced my course of study at Loyola [Marymount], and death once again ripped through our small family.”

This short quotation serves as a turning point for both Rose’s life and the book’s narrative. Up until this point, readers see Rose struggle with his education and life in his Los Angeles neighborhood, and his life often seems hopeless. These lines serve as a signpost for readers signaling that the trajectory of the story is about to undergo a major, hopeful change. Over the next few pages, readers witness Rose transform from a struggling young man to a star student whose hard work lands him a fellowship to graduate school.

“We live, in America, with so many platitudes about motivation and self-reliance and individualism—and myths spun from them, like those of Horacio Alger—that we find it hard to accept the fact that they are serious nonsense. To live your early life on the streets of South L.A.—or Homewood or Spanish Harlem or Chicago’s South Side or any one of hundreds of other depressed communities—and to journey up through the top levels of the American educational system will call for support and guidance at many, many points along the way.”

Most of the book’s third chapter is autobiographical, but this passage is an example of Rose connecting his own experiences to the larger problem of students being left behind by the educational system. One of the problems with the system, according to Rose’s first chapter, are the myths people cling to about American education and remedial students. Rose challenges the idea that a person can overcome adversity alone. Americans often refer to this as “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” and Rose argues that such an idea is a myth, especially as far as his own experience is concerned. Rose says his success is a group effort, and he argues that a community mentality is critical for reshaping education in a way that embraces—rather than excludes—working class and underserved students.

“Those four men collectively gave me the best sort of liberal education, the kind longed for in the stream of blue-ribbon reports on the humanities that now cross my desk. I developed the ability to read closely, to persevere in the face of uncertainty and ask questions of what I was reading—not with downcast eyes, but freely, aloud, realizing there is no such thing as an open book.”

Here, “those four men” refer to Rose’s mentors at LMU: Mr. Johnson, Dr. Carothers, Dr. Erlandson, and Father Albertson. Thanks to MacFarland, Rose receives one-on-one tutoring time with his professors, and their familiarity and attention is what transforms Rose from a struggling student into one of the best English students at LMU. Rose uses this as a model for what education, especially for remedial students, should look like. It is not casting aside students who struggle into vocational programs; rather, it involves meeting these students at their level, giving them the attention they need, and guiding them toward success.

“My writing, by now, was pretty good, but it contained the telltale signs of its origins: sociolinguistic gaffes (using different than rather than different from, lie for lay, drug for dragged) and run-of-the-mill misspellings (Isreal, aquaint, prestiege) as well as confusions that elicited from my professors witty jabs in the margins: writing emersing for immersing or chaplin for chaplain—a blunder that, in this context, was like having your fly open at cotillion. I started keeping vocabulary lists, for I daily heard and read words that were foreign to me: beguile, nib, dapple, reify, kismet, culpable, damask, crimp, evanescent, denizen, piquant, lassitude, skein, diffident.”

One of the major motifs in Lives on the Boundary is language. For Rose, getting his education meant learning a different way of thinking and speaking. Here, Rose shows readers how in order to participate—and succeed—in school, he had to learn a new way of speaking that others could understand. Language, then, serves as yet another hurdle for low-income, low-performing students trying to get an education.

“And I began to appreciate the remarkable complexity of human action and the difficulty of attributing causality to any one condition or reason. This would prove to be most valuable when I later entered the world of education.”

At this point in the book, Rose has put his fellowship at UCLA on hold in order to take courses in psychology. While Rose decides that psychology is not the field for him, he learns some important lessons from his professors. One of these is the idea that problems are complicated and rarely attributable to a single cause. Rose embraces this philosophy, and it shapes his argument about how to keep remedial students from slipping through the cracks.

“Lillian explained that these houses had been built in the early 1940s and had since become the bloodiest place in East L.A. It was generally believed that the police wouldn’t go in there unless they had heavy support. If they went in at all. Kids were playing baseball and tag and war on the dirt and brown grass. Women were talking to each other form the front steps of their homes […] An old Ford pulled around our car and into the projects, and a man in […] overalls got out and limped around back of the hut closest to us. ‘This project is called Maravilla,’ said Lillian. ‘And do you know what that means? It means ‘the marvelous place.’ Can you beat that?”

One of the major themes in Lives on the Boundary is the difference between stereotypes and the truth. Rose is concerned with the ways stereotypes serve as justification for abandoning people on the margins of society, and this quotation is an excellent example of the negative power of stereotype. Maravilla has the reputation for being so scary that the police refuse to enter it, but what Rose sees is a community—albeit an incredibly poor one—much like any other. Children play outside, women hang laundry, men come home from work. It is, as Lillian points out, a “marvelous place.” What Rose sees of Maravilla runs counter to its reputation. But because of stereotyping, the residents of Maravilla are unfairly labeled as dangerous, which limits their access to services that could help lift them out of poverty. Thus, Rose highlights the danger of buying into stereotypes while showing readers that the truth is both less dramatic and more complex.

“I joined the Teacher Corps for a variety of reasons: frustrations with graduate study, a desire to work with people, my draft board, which, once I left UCLA, was after me. But essentially I was moving away from dead ends more than being drawn toward children. I had a lot to learn.”

 This quotation summarizes Rose’s motivation for joining the Teacher Corps. He finds himself dissatisfied with graduate school, and that restlessness drives him to try something different. It is important to note that Rose’s initial motivations are not completely altruistic: he does not join the corps because teaching is his passion. Rather, he follows a path that he hopes will lead him away from the “dead ends” of his life. This distinction is important in considering Rose’s personal growth; over the course of Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, readers will see Rose begin to embrace teaching and develop a passion for helping students.

“The churches these children attended told them they were made in the image of God. But I began to wonder what images they were creating for themselves as they came to know that their physical being was so vulnerable, that whatever beauty they bore could be dismissed by the future or destroyed on the street. The schools could have intervened but instead seemed to misperceive them and place them on the margin.”

Here, Rose acknowledges that many of the problems that face marginal and low-performing students, like violence, poverty, and racism, are outside of the educational system’s control. He points out that these negative outside factors shape how students see themselves and their future opportunities. Instead of combating them, however, Rose argues that schools use those indicators as justification for marginalizing the students who need intervention the most.

“Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance. […] Knowledge gained its meaning at least initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation of the kind Jack MacFarland and Frank Carothers and the others used to have with their students. My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me.”

In these lines, Rose is playing on one of the definitions of romance, which is “an emotional attraction.” He does not mean romance in the sense of intimate love; rather, Rose sees teaching as a process of wooing students and convincing them to embrace knowledge. And, much like a romantic relationship, Rose believes teaching begins with a relational connection. The desire to please that comes from a strong teacher-student relationship can transform students from passive attendees into active learners.

“Now I came to understand something about the misery that sparks such combative defiance, the desperation it reveals: The Children’s rebellion was all the more troubling because of its ultimate loneliness.”

When students exist on the margins, they find themselves in an extremely isolated position. They are often pulled from their “normal” classes to attend special remediation courses, which makes them feel singled out and different. In some cases, vocational education becomes a separate educational track, where vocational learners rarely interact with the rest of the student body. Systems like these serve to reiterate what many of these students already experience at home, whether it is isolation due to working parents, emotional/physical abuse, or lack of opportunity due to poverty. Rose believes most of his students’ defensiveness and/or misbehavior comes from a place of loneliness and fear that is informed by their lives outside of school, and it is exacerbated by “the various remedial procedures” they experience in the classroom (127).

“American meritocracy is validated and sustained by the deep-rooted belief in equal opportunity. But can we really say that kids like those I taught have equal access to America’s educational resources?”

This powerful statement is a core part of Rose’s argument. Even if one believes that the American educational system is doing its best—and Rose admits that the system has come a long way—readers struggle to reconcile Rose’s narrative with America’s belief in equal opportunity. Socioeconomic factors put Rose’s students at a disadvantage, which schools then often exacerbate. Rose’s rhetorical question is part prompt, part condemnation: it forces readers consider whether the concept they have of American education matches the reality, and Rose implies that it does not.

“The men wanted to change their lives, and for all their earlier failures, they still held onto an American dream: Education held the power to equalize things.”

At the beginning of the book, Rose talks about myths, especially the idea that education used to be better in the past. But there are other types of ideas that shape American society’s perception of itself and its values. One of these ideas is the American Dream, which states that anyone can improve their lot in life through tenacity and hard work. The American Dream hinges on a belief in equality and that everyone deserves a chance to succeed, and one of the avenues for this is equal education for all. The idea that education can lift people up is so strong that people who are the victims of systemic marginalization—like those in the Veteran’s Program—still believe in it, even though they have experienced unequal access to educational resources firsthand. But that is not to say Rose thinks that the American Dream does not exist for his students. Rather, he wholeheartedly believes education is the path to opportunity, but he also argues that a broken system stands in between some students and equality through education. That is why he decides to shed light on those who fall through the cracks by writing Lives on the Boundary.

“There were times when we were more social workers than teachers, and I think that dual role—following as it did the experience in the Teachers Corps—profoundly laid open the social dimension of teaching. It shaped the way I thought about the classroom.”

Rose challenges the preconceived notion that teaching begins and ends in the classroom. Rose argues that helping students means connecting with them, and that happens by treating them as a whole person, not just another person in a writing course. As a result of his early teaching experiences, Rose develops a classroom philosophy that combines psychology, counseling, knowledge, and kindness in order to help students succeed.

“Every so often, people come together and create in places like the Extension Building a special kind of work. From the work, a few of the helpers and a few of those being helped emerge transformed. Then money dries up, new political agendas are drawn, the people leave, new ones cease to come. The programs fade. They’re written up and filed away.”

Rose sums up one of the problems with remedial education in this passage. He praises the importance of education programs like the Veteran’s Program, but unfortunately, these programs are highly politicized since they intersect with other hot-button social issues like poverty, crime, and race. When the political winds shift, so does funding, so solutions like the Veteran’s Program are often short-lived. Thus, marginal students have to navigate their own needs as well as the shifting landscape of access; in other words, they are constantly having to figure out where to get help, which often requires literacy skills these students do not have. Consequently, helping students who are lost in the system becomes more complicated when programs designed to help them are unstable.

“The Tutorial Center also served low-income white and low- and middle-income minority students, but because the kind of students who make it to a place like UCLA enter with a long history of success and, to varying degrees, have removed superficial indicators of their lineage, it’s harder, at first glance, to see how profoundly a single assignment or a whole academic career can be affected by background and social circumstance—by interactions of class, race, and gender.”

In the early chapters of the book, the struggles of Rose’s students are obvious. They are inscribed upon them by overt poverty, or behavioral issues, or something as easily identifiable as the inability to speak English. It is easy to label the people with these markers as vocational because they cannot hide the things that make them “different.” Initially, the students who visit the UCLA tutoring center seem very different than those in the Veteran’s Program; Rose’s UCLA students were successful in high school and unused to educational struggle. But Rose discovers that under that guise, they are just as much victims of socioeconomic circumstance as his previous students. Rose spends the rest of Chapter 7 explaining this to his readers and discussing how the culture of universities makes it even harder for marginalized students to get the help they need.

“The etymology of the word remedial places its origins in law and medicine, and by the late nineteenth century the term generally fell into the medical domain. It was then applied to education, to children who were thought to have neurological problems. But remedial quickly generalized beyond the description of such students to those with broader, though special, educational problems and then to those learners who were from backgrounds that did not provide optimal environmental and educational opportunities.”

Here, Rose traces the origins of remediation. He explains that the term “remedial” was once a medical term that was then appropriated for educational use, initially just for those students whose learning problems come from some neurological disorder. But the definition keeps expanding to include any student who struggles in school, even those who are cognitively normal but affected by other socioeconomic factors. The problem with this—beyond its blanket unfairness—is that it pathologizes failure. In other words, low performance becomes a kind of “illness” that needs to be “cured.” As a result, marginalized students end up quarantined from other students, as though their struggles were contagious.

“They could read, with fair comprehension, simple news articles, could pay bills, follow up on sales and coupons, deal with school forms for their kids, and help illiterate neighbors in their interactions with the government. Their skills were pretty low-level and limited profoundly the kinds of things they could read or write, but they lived and functioned amid print. The sad thing is that we don’t really have tests of such naturally occurring competence.”

Rose challenges stereotypes throughout Lives on the Boundary, and in this quotation, he tackles the idea that all remedial learners are completely illiterate. While Rose’s students perform very poorly on standardized tests, he argues those evaluations are inaccurate benchmarks for his students’ actual aptitude. While his students might not be able to solve word problems, they have the literacy skills to function as productive members of society, even if their educational struggles have limited their social opportunities. In doing so, Rose confronts readers with their own preconceived notions about remedial learners.

“Desire gets confused on South Vermont. There were times when I wanted so much to be other than what I was […][b]ut, strange blessing, we can never really free ourselves from the mood of early neighborhoods, from our first stories, from the original tales of hope and despair.”

South Vermont becomes a metaphor that permeates throughout the book. Initially, the neighborhood haunts Rose, as he tries to get away from his history as a vocational student, but by the end of the book, Rose finds value in his history. In this quotation, Rose explains that his childhood is a part of him, and it shapes him as both a person and an educator. In this moment, Rose recognizes that without his experiences in South Vermont, he would not be able to advocate for other students who come from similar circumstances.