The Poor Intellectual in America’s Bread Basket

Sarah Smarsh

Late in journalist Sarah Smarsh’s autobiography, Heartland, she undertakes that most time-honored of adulthood rites: leaving for college. In Smarsh’s case, this passage carries special significance. As the first member of her family to attend college, she arrives without the prior knowledge of how to “do school” that many of her peers already possess. And coming from dirt poverty, she carries the necessity to survive that most college students lack.

Smarsh doesn’t dwell on this; it’s only one long-ish scene in her final chapter. She received a full-ride scholarship to cover her tuition, but needed three jobs to afford room and board. The system we have, Smarsh writes, tacitly assumes students’ parents will shoulder the financial burden of education. Because America’s higher education system bears the toolmarks of its makers, who were themselves well-off, and expected likewise from their students.

I remember, during my brief academic career, repeating a time-honored bromide to my students: “Nobody’s ever too tired to read.” I’d heard that from my teachers in public school, and internalized it, despite not having gone straight from high school to college. An inveterate reader from my childhood, I saw reading as innately pleasurable, a source of energy rather than a consumer of it. And I couldn’t comprehend why anyone, like my students, saw it otherwise.

Not until my adjunct position ended without fanfare did I realize how false that claim was. Turned loose onto the demands of a regional economy that had little need for my skills, and desperately in need of grocery money, I accepted a job beneath my capabilities, simply because it was there. (And simply because I loathe the job-hunting process.) And within a matter of weeks, I discovered, for the first time, that it was possible to be too tired to read.

Sometime later, I would learn the mechanics behind this. Though the brain remains deeply enigmatic to scientists, our best research minds have definitely uncovered some facts. One is that the brain draws energy from the same well as the body. What’s more, it draws energy completely disproportionate to its mass: your brain is less than two percent of your body’s mass, yet consumes more than 20% of your body’s energy.

And when the well is dry, the well is dry.

Not until leaving academia and entering the factory (and later construction) did I discover what weariness meant. Sure, I’d been tired in high school, as many people were, but not the soul-sucking weariness of pulling an eight-hour shift, then coming home to housekeeping, cooking, and generally taking care of myself. Left with the same two or three free hours everyone else has, for the first time, I found myself too tired to read.

Reading Smarsh’s description of working three jobs to subsidize taking classes, I felt that weariness again. It’s taken me ten years to regain sufficient energy to read after work, and even that is inconsistent; most days I can read some, but some days, I’m fortunate if I can stare mindlessly at my phone for a few hours. Some days, I’m lucky to wolf microwave food before lapsing into coma-like sleep.

Yet despite that, Smarsh not only had wherewithal enough to complete her degree, she had enough to complete graduate school and move onto a career. Reading her story, it’s easy to understand why: she had a personal vision, one she wanted to pursue without regard for economic limitations. She was fortunate to have that. Too many of my students from poor backgrounds had few aspirations beyond a vague desire for middle-class comfort.

Many of my students, who heard me state that bullshit about “nobody’s too tired to read,” had outside jobs. At least two told me they were working nearly full-time during the week, then driving back to their hometowns to pull shifts at their parents’ farms or machine shops. Conventional academic theorists would say these students were cruising for failure, that working so many hours outside class guaranteed defeat. Work or school: pick one, you can’t do both.

I suspect these students would reply: “Rent is due.”

Education remains, at least nominally, America’s guarantee for a middle-class lifestyle. My poor students chased a degree, not to improve themselves, but to improve their economic prospects. Couple that with crushing student debt, and a job market that doesn’t offer self-sustaining jobs anymore, and school can be as much a recipe for failure as success. I can only imagine how insulting it was to hear me say “nobody’s too tired to read.”