“Public school or private school, we’re all teenagers in the end.”
Those were the wise words of Reece Avila, a Grade 12 student at Byrne Creek Secondary School who was part of a recent student exchange between Byrne Creek and St. Thomas More Collegiate.
The exchange was set up to help bridge the worlds of Burnaby’s public and private schools, and the students discovered that their differences were far less vast than they had expected. The experience of spending a day at each others’ school, then debriefing about it afterwards, opened the students’ eyes to the common ground between them.
Byrne Creek students quickly learned that STM students weren’t all ties and Bibles, and STM students found Byrne Creek far more accepting than expected.
It’s an experience that was clearly valuable to the students on both sides of the table, and we offer kudos to the teachers and schools involved.
Now, if only we could figure out some way of making this kind of “people swap” work on a broader societal level. Could we somehow manage to have everyone take turns living in each other’s space for awhile, just to help us recognize that – like Byrne Creek and STM – the gulf between us and those we see as “other” may not be anywhere near as wide as we think it is.
There are so many labels with which we define ourselves and thereby, rightly or wrongly, also define those who don’t share our labels.
Man or woman. Young or old. Parent or non-parent. White or person of colour. Working or jobless. Heterosexual or LGBTQ. Left-leaning or right-leaning. Religious or atheist.
Living in our own box, we sometimes don’t recognize or understand the lives of those in that box we’ve labelled “other.”
And we don’t see the truth that Reece discovered – which is that, despite our differences, we’re all human in the end.
If only we could focus on that shared humanity, perhaps we could find more ways to occupy this same space – this city, this province, this country, this planet – with less rancour and bickering, less finger-pointing and marginalizing and othering, and just a little more understanding and cooperation.
