OPINION: Catlin should run trips to other parts of the United States; Here's why.

Courtesy of Augsburg University

Imagine this. You’re in fourth grade, sitting in class the day after the 2016 election and the boy sitting next to you is wearing a red hat that reads “Make America Great Again”. Outside your building, in the Upper School quad Vineyard Vines-clad boys wave Trump flags and scream “F**k Hillary.” 

Your sister ignores them before going to class where her history teacher plays funeral music and wears all black mourning the results of the election. That’s not some fictitious story but what actually happened at my private school in Atlanta, Georgia on Nov. 9, 2016. 

My school, Pace Academy, was the complete opposite of the Catlin Gabel School (CGS). It built a new football field every five years and asked elementary school teachers to treat kids from higher-income families differently. 

Pace was located in a distinctly wealthy, red area of Atlanta called Buckhead, a location that often drew conservative or right-leaning people to it because of the tax bracket. I lived across the city in a historically blue County. Which meant during elections I started my drive to school with lawns littered with blue political signs and watched them slowly shift to red. 

On Nov. 5, 2024, students at CGS walked into assembly with the words: “Today is not a normal day” and “It’s okay to not feel ok” greeting us on the projector screen. The school felt like it was mourning; I actually cried with someone else while watching Kamala Harris’s concession speech in our Body Systems class. 

For better or for worse, CGS is the exception in that scenario, not the rule. More environments like schools, workplaces, colleges, and cities often mimic the chaotic and divided atmosphere that my school in Atlanta did. 

But since I had experienced that chaos before in Atlanta, I was not left wondering what had happened like some of my classmates were the day after the election. Almost everyone I talked to was confused as to how Trump had won after the impeachment and felony charges. Although I was similarly upset, I had seen firsthand how people were able to overlook clear red flags in a candidate before.

CGS Upper School Social Studies Teacher Peter Shulman grew up a ten-minute walk from where I lived in Atlanta. Shulman said that growing up there had a similarly profound impact on him. 

“Elections, had students voted, would have been close to fifty-fifty is my guess, it would be way less lopsided than say Catlin Gabel today,” said Shulman about his high school, where he believes that within the 1,000-person student body he “dealt with in some ways a broader swath of society in terms of belief systems.” 

But Shulman went on to recall that just because his school contained one type of diversity, it didn’t necessarily include all. “In some ways that’s true,” said Shulman. “But in other ways, it's not true because I grew up in a world that was very much white people and black people.”

Shulman said that when he was living in the South, there were very few people who didn’t fit into those two groups. “I’m not sure I knew anyone at my high school of 1,000 that was South Asian,” he said. Shulman speculated that there may have been ten or fifteen students of East Asian descent and maybe two or four of Hispanic descent. 

So even in a large high school that has certain types of diversity, there will almost always be perspectives missing. Once you start looking for those perspectives you are missing, you don’t stop finding them either. 

CGS’s Upper School’s student body is significantly smaller than Shulman’s, with 312 students. As a school, it also often draws from a similar demographic of people. Typically wealthy and liberal families are the ones that are either able to or choose to attend CGS, leading to a phenomenon often referred to as the “Catlin Bubble.” 

This bubble provides an inclusive and supportive system but unfortunately, one that is very rarely replicated outside the CGS community. Due to the like-mindedness of the student body when students leave the bubble it can be a shock to the system. 

Olivia Morrison, Class of 2024, has already experienced this in her first semester of school at California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly). 

“The Catlin bubble is very real,” stated Morrison. “You are surrounded by people who mostly agree with you socially and politically.” She recalled how when she moved to California she didn’t find the CGS environment replicated, and that she was pretty surprised by some people’s beliefs. 

“I was surprised by the amount of conservative people at Cal-Poly because I wasn’t expecting that from California,” said Morrison. But she also admitted that when coming from CGS  “anything is going to seem more conservative.” She observed that the CGS environment is not an accurate representation of the US.

Morrison recalled a time when one night, she went to a party at a fraternity and was shocked to see “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. A saying, which in modern contexts is used as a Conservative slogan to convey the message that the government does not have the right to impose laws on self-rights, especially when it comes to gun regulation. 

“When I mentioned something to my friends they asked me ‘You don’t see that often?’” said Morrison. She explained that many of her friends grew up in places like Orange County in California or other less liberal areas. Morrison had replied, “I guess not.”

After the 2024 election, Morrison had similar experiences to mine at Pace in 2016. 

“There was this big celebration party in one of the dorms,” said Morrison. “I was just sort of shook that more people weren’t super upset.”

Although the politics of even a California school surprised Morrison, she said that was not the only thing CGS had not prepared her for. 

“One thing Catlin did not expose me to was religion. There are people that are religious but they don't really talk about it,” claimed Morrison. She stated that she had several encounters with those who were religious where she felt like she should have known more than she did.

When proposed with the idea of CGS running trips to other parts of the United States Morrison thought it was a great idea. She also stated that CGS could work on “talking more about other perspectives in an objective way, so we can know about policy and stuff like that.”

Although Morrison, an Oregon native and student at CGS since sixth grade, never went on a trip to another part of the country through the school, she, like many students, participated in Global Education. 

CGS already offers an excellent global education resource, running trips this year to go backpacking in Japan and a homestay program with students in Thailand. While it is important to be educated about the world, we should also have an understanding of our own country as well. 

In a similar philosophy to the global education system, it is not always enough to learn about it from a bird's eye view in a classroom. 

The United States is a large, hugely populated, and complicated place. It has layers of nuance and relationships both damaged and strengthened by the events of its short history. This has made it a place that is impossible to understand by simply staying where you are comfortable.

First-hand experience is powerful, being able to hear about someone’s lived experience that is different from your own can completely change your perspective on things. 

Before Shulman began teaching at CGS, he worked at a school that ran a program that allowed students in his high school to stay on Native American reservations. Students would stay with a family and live with them for a few weeks. 

“I think everyone that went on those trips got a lot out of it,” said Shulman. CGS actually ran a similar program after the 2016 election led by former Palma Scholars Program Director Dave Whitson, which Shulman assisted with. 

CGS students were able to spend a week living and going to school in smaller, more rural high schools like Sutherland High School just south of Roseburg. Whitson proposed and worked hard to create this trip after the election in an attempt to prevent political polarization, an issue that has become increasingly more dire over the past decade.  

A study published in the National Library of Health found that informal political discussions can  “increase trust in democracy and improve understanding of self and others.” The study points out that these conversations are most beneficial when civil and sought after outside our own friendships and social networks. 

Shulman pointed out the same positive things when observing the effect of the trips on his students in the past. He agreed that first-hand experience and conversations have had profound impacts on students, especially when coming from a bubble-like environment such as CGS. 

Trips can get students to parts of the United States they would not have visited otherwise. Possibilities like a trip to Charleston in South Carolina where only 5 out of 98 CGS students that filled out the survey, had ever been before. Or to New Orleans as only 7 students had ever visited Louisiana, when in comparison nearly 96 people had been to California and 44 had visited Massachusetts.

Trips could be more local as well— programs like the one from 2017 to rural areas of Oregon and Washington to increase conversations with people with different backgrounds. 

Although for many students this might seem like a daunting or potentially anxiety-inducing task, it will only worsen problems in the United States if ignored. The year 2023 was one of the most unproductive years in Congress in American history, only twenty bills were passed in both chambers. Most of this is due to the fact that people are less willing to talk across the aisle, and part of it is the unwillingness to attempt to understand or speak with those with different perspectives. 

Gaining insights and making a purposeful effort to get outside of the bubble, can prevent both the shock that comes with going to college like Morrison experienced and also begin working towards a less polarized society. 

I'm not saying my time living in the South was all insights and enlightenment. There were moments that made me mad, that made me upset but ultimately those experiences have been essential in adding to my understanding of the United States and my place as a person who lives here. But I definitely do not know everything just because I lived in that one place. 

It's not just political perspectives we often lack at CGS. There could be so much to gain by talking to those with rural, working-class, and religious backgrounds for example. 

There is always more to learn and much more to be gained by learning it firsthand. 

So although it might seem daunting we can’t just ignore the parts of America we don’t agree with and/or are shielded from because of the school we are fortunate to go to. We live here, and it would be doing both ourselves and our greater responsibility as people who carry an American passport a disservice, to not at least try and understand it.