Studying The Natives In Their Natural Habitat

Some Harvard students--most of whom grew up in cities, never shot a firearm, and were from liberal states--spent several days traveling in small-town America as part of a school program:

Even though these kids had almost all been raised in the United States, our journey sometimes felt like an anthropology course, as though they were seeing the rest of the country for the first time. And this was their opening lesson.

Good experience, great story, and wonderful ending:

The students’ course was coming to an end, and while no-one got college credit or earned a grade, they had all passed my most important test. They had taken a walk down Main Street and made a lot more friends than judgments. They had learned that, in order to understand a country’s politics, you first have to understand its people. That means getting out of your bubble and spending time away from people like you. If you don’t, Kuang said, “you lose the ability to spark the evolution needed to bridge the country’s divide"...

In our final week, the class attended Mass at St. Stanislaus, a Polish church in the Strip District of downtown Pittsburgh. Before then, only two of my students had stepped foot in a Catholic church.

At the end of Mass an older gentleman came up to me and said how nice it was to see young people dressed up and going to church. When I told him they were students from Harvard, he beamed.

“I have been reading for years that college kids these days are thin-skinned, what’s that word . . .? Snowbirds, snowflakes, anyways . . . that they have no easiness with meeting someone new or trying something different or won’t be open to opposing opinions,” he said.

He smiled as he gave my kids an approving thumbs-up.

“Don’t you just love when a stereotype is blown up right in front of you?”

Stereotypes were blown up on both sides.