If someone asked you that question, how would you answer?
I'd venture to say that in the US, you would respond with the name of your college/university. Yes, if two people were to meet in a pub/restaurant/street in pick-whatever-US-city and ask each other "Where did you go to school?", the answer would be the name of a university.
However, in Dublin, if two 40 year old men meet in a pub and ask each other that question, they will respond with their primary and secondary schools. Seriously!
I find this thoroughly fascinating. Indeed, here in Ireland, where you went to primary and secondary school plays a very central role in your identity. Evidently it is very insightful information, of much more important interest to someone you've just met, than where you went to college (or what fraternity you went to--see the corresponding post below). For it reveals things about the region where you grew up, the smaller local community of which you were a part, who your friends are, the kind of person you were shaped to be.
Which brings me to the next point: people in Ireland are more likely to retain their secondary school friends for life rather than their college friends. In fact, they tend to stay around the area where they grew up and continue to hang with the same people and families throughout their lives. One does not move off to college and make a new community there, rather it is always the home roots that is the strong determining factor of social circles.
In the US, the tendency is to move away to college, and during those years to gain independence, begin to see life in a broader way and form one's own views away from the prescriptions of parents/family/community of the earlier years. In the university environment and season of life, one makes the lifelong friends--for they have bonded through these times of struggle and deeper personal formation.
But not so in Ireland.
Folks are identified by their primary/secondary schools and the local community in which they were raise.
I suppose it is only possible for these to be important and insightful in a small place where people actually know the primary and secondary schools, and there is considerable conformity within them. And as I've written before on this blog, on this small island, it seems no Irish person is beyond 2-3 degrees of separation from the next!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
There's also just a simple difference in vocabulary. Whereas in the US "school" can and is referred to as college, we don't talk about university as school. The word "school" only means education up to the age of 18. Actually if you asked someone who'd been to uni where they went to college they'd probably tell you that actually they went to uni: colleges tend to be places for doing more vocational subjects (e.g. nursing college or teacher trainign college)
Good point, thanks for clarifying the difference in vocabulary.
Oh, and I'd forgotten, that's another word I find fun: "uni." I chuckle whenever I hear that word used in a normal sentence. Seems like a word chosen when speaking to a toddler, not when conversing with another adult in reference to an institution of higher education.
Post a Comment