You Will Be Rewarded for Separation and Call It Growth

Abstract

The author---a university professor---uses currere to examine three autobiographical scenes across a fifty–year span: a childhood encounter with televangelism, a funeral in the author’s hometown, and an unexpected moment of prayer from university students. Read through Pinar’s synthetical frame, these scenes reveal how institutions—religious, educational, and professional—organize belonging through codes that reward separation and name it growth. Drawing on hooks, Bourdieu, Rose, and Britzman, the analysis traces how upward mobility in schooling demands new identities while distancing individuals from the cultural worlds that shaped them. The author argues that becoming “educated” often entails learning to maintain institutional boundaries that feel natural but are structurally produced, and that moments of unscripted intimacy—like students laying hands in prayer—expose both the fragility and the cost of these boundaries. Rather than offering resolution, the author sits with the tensions of class mobility, recognition, and institutional care, asking what it means to prepare future teachers while inhabiting the separations that schooling creates.