When James Baldwin says, “The world is larger,” I believe he means to say that there is so much more that exists beyond the scope of what you can simply see right in front of you and around you. The majority of people live for many years, or their whole lives, in a very small portion of the world. A neighborhood consisting of a few blocks, in which they become accustomed to. Soon enough, this neighborhood becomes their “world” so to speak. Everything that happens in this neighborhood becomes a part of their lives and learning experience, the information gathered from these experiences become what these people believe life in general just is. If a boy were to grow up his whole life in a crime-ridden project area of New York City, being poor all the time and never being able to do anything for himself because he doesn’t have the means to, then he will believe that the world is a cruel and unforgiving place. He will believe that life is horrible and that that he is going to suffer like this for the rest of his life because this is the only information that he has ever been exposed to for his whole life. The reality is, the world is in fact very cruel, but also very loving. It contains all kinds of experiences and things, good and bad, that this boy will never get to experience because he doesn’t have the means to leave this small part of the world he was born into. Reality, for many people, only consists of these small portions of the world that they are confined to, they cannot conceive anything outside of it because they have never seen it before and so the rest of the actual world might as well not exist at all.
I wish I had been taught the actual realities of life in school. School lied to me when it taught me that the way forward was doing all this book work and then going to college to get a degree and then get a job in my field of studied expertise. It’s not that simple, things get in the way, and things in my life changed and I was in no way prepared for that. There were variables in my life I had no control over and I was never taught how to cope with them. School teaches you how to be book smart, not street smart. It gives you basic information that most likely will end up being useless in your life and doesn’t give you actual life skills that will prepare you for the world outside of the confines of its walls. It’s very restricting, and the school system needs to teach kids from an early age how to prepare to become adults by giving them actual specialized skills that they can use to live life on their own after they graduate.
