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When I first arrived at the New Jersey Scholars Program, a five-week interdisciplinary study of the African continent, one of my peers, Mike Medford, turned to me and asked, “Do you honestly think we’ll get anything educational out of this experience?”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I don’t know, but I’m anxious to find out.” The sheer volume of African history and the astounding variety of African culture only fueled my anxiety; after all, how could a five-week summer program even begin to uncover the secrets of a continent shrouded by a fog of global misunderstanding?
But my preliminary anxieties soon evaporated. The cooperative learning environment fostered by the instructors was unlike anything I had previously experienced. Exposed at my high school only to the competitive mindset that has all too often taken classrooms hostage, I encountered an atmosphere where academic competition did not accompany the quest for intellectual enlightenment. Without the confining competitiveness to which I had grown accustomed, I worked closely with my peers to dissect technical dissertations on deforestation in central Africa, to analyze the importance of oral tradition in the narration of South African literature and to ascertain the influence of the Marxist movement on the quest for Nigerian independence. We didn’t limit our learning to the classroom, either. We spent our Saturday nights together under the shimmering stars, discussing anti-colonial resistance movements while listening to South African rap music; we analyzed the causes of the “brain drain” in Nigeria while wading into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. For five weeks, we all were intellectuals living in a scholarly colony where cooperative learning was the law and competitiveness was a capital crime. Thanks to this cooperative atmosphere, the breadth of understanding I attained in the first week alone eclipsed my expectations for the entire five week program.
The Scholars...