This is just a kind of a in general question, no offense to anyone. Here s the story: my friend dropped out of high school at 16, got her GED and is in the middle of getting her bachelor s, and has said that since moving to the mainland she gets a lot of negative reactions when she tells people she got her GED, that she never got those kind of reactions in Hawaii because there isn t a huge stigma attached to GEDs there. I was wondering if this is an accurate assumption for all of Hawaii compared to the mainland, or is she exaggerating it?
Your question seems like a simple one on the surface, but it s not. There are a couple of things you need to understand about the cultures in Hawaii. The first is that society is not structured here like it is North America. The people making big money and having a lot of education are not necessarily at the top (though many of them think they are). Hawaii is dominated by a working class culture. I m going to use food to illustrate my point, because food is very important here.When I told my students on Molokai that kids where I grew up would never confess to getting government cheese for their own household back in the 80s--they always said their grandmother got it--my students didn t understand that all all. No Shame! they said, meaning there was no shame in being poor and accepting help. They did not approve of people who did not approve of poverty or government assistance.To understand local attitudes about education, it helps to understand a little bit of Hawaiian history. Before Captain Cook arrived, people learned what they needed from the adults in their family and community. As they went about their day, they were moving a lot: cutting down coconuts and fronds for thatching roofs, hunting, fishing, diving, paddling canoes, dancing hula, stomping down weeds in the kalo (taro) ponds, pounding kalo (taro) into poi, and so forth. This kind of kinesthetic learning is still valued by very traditional families today, who spend little time in front of a book, computer, or TV. Some of these find it very difficult to sit in a desk for six hours a day, and some of those get an ADHD label stuck on them early on. But pretty much, from the beginning of English-language instruction in Hawaii, there were separate schools for the privileged (the children of missionaries and royalty) and for the others. In the 1890s, when Her Hawaiian Majesty was overthrown with the help of US Marines and kept prisoner in her own bedroom in the palace, the Hawaiian language was banned as a medium of instruction. This means that lessons could no longer be taught in Hawaiian. It s only been within the last 15 years that some students have been able to get most of their classes taught in Hawaiian again from kindergarten through high school in Hawaiian Language Immersion programs and schools. For more than a century, many Local kids (Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Puerto Rican, etc.) growing up on the plantations spoke a dialect that is called Hawaiian Creole English by the folks at the university and Pidgin by anybody who actually speaks it. It s pretty much a mixture of English, Hawaiian, Chinese, and Portuguese grammar and vocabulary. People who can also speak standard North American English speak Pidgin for a few basic reasons: to mark themselves as Hawaiian or Local, to keep outsiders from knowing what they re talking about, or for humor. Some folks from particular geographic areas can pretty much only speak Pidgin, even if they think they re speaking standard English. You could speak Pidgin at school in the early 20th century, but you d be punished for speaking in Hawaiian, even if you were chatting on the playground. About this time, Hawaiian and Local students started to figure out, This school is not for me. I don t know who it s for, but it s not for me. In the 1930s, an English teacher from North America reported to work at a plantation school, and was told by the plantation boss, Teach the children, but don t teach them too much! The more the workers knew, and the more they communicated with each other, the more difficult is was to pay them low wages for grueling labor. As recently as fifty years ago, there was a separate public school called the Standard English School, where the children of plantation bosses could go, along with others who passed a spoken English test. The students and teachers in the other schools pretty much spoke Pidgin. For the last half of the 20th Century, pretty much 2/3 of the school teachers in Hawaii were Americans of Japanese Ancestry. A professor I know put his son in private school when the boy s teacher corrected, Casey pointed to the stands to read, Casey went point to the stands. So, the Hawaiian and Local kids who get a good education either stay in North America--where they went to college, where there are more opportunities for those with degrees, and where a higher standard of living is so much easier to get--or they return to their communities and struggle to fit in. Modern Hawaii is a tourism based economy, and you don t need a PhD to change sheets in hotel rooms or bring tropical drinks to tourists. So no. In most families and communities, there s No Shame about getting a GED.
I think there is somewhat of a stigma attached to a GED, no matter where you live. But Hawaii people are going to be more polite about not making a deal out of it. Once your friend has that bachelor s degree, the problem should go away.
Ari Gold is God has got it all wrong-1. Speaking pidgin is a cultural thing. People in Hawaii don t speak it solely because they are uneducated.2. Graduation is a big day because family actually means something in Hawaii. Locals have a strong sense of family and closeness, something the mainland lacks, which is why on graduation day you see kids with leis up to their heads.It signifies one stepping stone that has been cleared. I speak pidgin but I know when to turn it off when I need to. I graduated high school and I now go to the university of las vegas, nevada. I am also a substitute teacher. I am not the exception, a lot of kids have futures after high school... even with a GED.Ultimately, you have to understand the culture of Hawaii. It is hard to explain to people who haven t lived there there whole lives why something is a certain way, etc.The reason why mainland people probably give your friend negative reactions is because mainland people are quit different from those of Hawaii. Ask anyone who s from Hawaii and now lives in the mainland.
She s not exaggerating one bit. What I m going to say is not me trying to mean, I m just being brutally honest. So with that said . . . education here in Hawaii is a secondary thought. We have the worst school system in the nation across the board. It s almost like if you are smart and educated then you re looked down on by the locals. There s a real tough guy attitude here, and from what I ve seen the ones who act that way are the ones who look/sound like they re drop outs. Wherever you live, the ones who make it a point to be tough and intimidating are uneducated.Most locals speak pidgen, which certainly doesn t help their case. I work with a lot of educated professionals and not a single one of them speaks pidgen. I also work with a lot of uneducated high school graduates and drop outs and they ALL speak pidgen. Here in Hawaii, high school graduation is the biggest day in a local s life. On graduation night, freeways get backed up from the ceremonies, families spend thousands of dollars on parties, and there s a vibe felt everywhere that something special is happening. I don t know about you, but where I come from on the Mainland graduating from high school is expected. Yeah you party, but for the most part it just signifies the end of one chapter in your life and the beginnning of another. Here in Hawaii, IF you graduate then it s a HUGE accomplishment and looked at as one of the greatest moments in your life! I ve never heard anyone refer to the high school they graduated from as their alma mater until I moved here.I think what it boils down to is that it s soo freakin expensive to live in Hawaii that most families live in crowded houses and need as many people to work just to get by. And I m sure most families certainly can t afford to send a family member to college. It s a vicious cycle that s hard to get out of.