The Process Glitch

Abstract

In an interview a teacher made with me some years ago, he asked, perceptively, if in identical settings a couple of students of different ethnic backgrounds would process the same information in different ways. The answer, of course, is a rotund no. None of us is a robot, responding mechanically to the stimulation that comes from the outside. Every individual reacts uniquely, spontaneously, even when coming from the same milieu. But then my interviewer narrowed down the field by suggesting that I imagine a set of boys whose adoptive parents are white: one of the kids is Latino, the other Asian. They receive the same feedback at home; at the request of their parents, they are placed in the exact same classroom through elementary, middle, and high school, and also enroll in the same college and pick the same major. Can we expect that one will see the world as a Latino and the other as an Asian? Or will the educational system erase genetic differences? It’s a theoretical question, of course. None of us behaves as a robot exclusively defined by the DNA we have stored in ourselves.