On Learning and Unlearning

Abstract

I remember passing our lunch lady–the nice one with a big bleach-blond afro. She was perched on an elementary-school-sized desk, eyes fixated to the television. I glanced at the screen on the way into my classroom while my teacher hesitated in the hallway, whispering to the other adults. She reentered the room a few minutes later to explain. In the following months, my television provided me with one of the most formative, practical and comprehensive educational experiences of my life. First it was vocabulary building, with the words like “hi-jacker,” and “terrorist.” Then it was physics, learning that inertia is the reason for absolute devastation when your plane crashes into a building. Soon, “Al-Qaeda,” “the Taliban,” and “Osama bin Laden” became part of my reality, as I watched a broadcast of young men in the “Middle East” (I was learning geography too!) burning American flags. [excerpt