What can we learn about education from J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy? There have been critiques of the broad strokes of his generalizations about Appalachian culture (See Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019)), but that’s not the focus of my analysis here.  I’m interested in Vance’s experiences in school as he recalls and describes them.  The story that Vance tells about his undergraduate years at Ohio State turns on one pivotal class encounter:

[A]t twenty-four, I was a little too old to be a second-year college student.  But with four years in the Marine Corps behind me, more separated me from the other students than age. During an undergraduate seminar in foreign policy, I listened as a nineteen-year-old classmate with a hideous beard spouted off about the Iraq War.

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What this non-veteran has to say, Vance disagrees with.  The classmate describes all soldiers as one problematic “type.”  Soldiers were “typically less intelligent” than straight-to-college students.  Soldiers “butchered and disrespected Iraqi civilians.” And so forth.  Vance’s first-hand experiences contradicted these views.  In the Marine Corps, Vance had worked alongside men and women with diverse views and diverse backgrounds.  “Many,” he writes, “of my Marine Corps friends were staunch liberals who had no love for our commander in chief—then George W. Bush.”  Additionally, rather than disrespecting Iraqis, Vance says his deployment included “never-ending training on how to respect Iraqi culture” (186).  This is a moment of classroom conflict.  Two students have different worldviews.  They are drawing on different sources of information to form opinions.

            Moments like this abound in healthy democracies, indeed in any collaboration.  America in particular is a large, diverse country whose citizens have different religious, ethnic, generational, geographic, and all-around cultural and personal experiences.  In order to live with any hope of non-violent civic participation and leadership, schools in democracies must train students to manage conflicts skillfully—neither fighting nor withdrawing.

            How did Vance’s professor—and all of the teachers in his years of school to this point—prepare him in advance for moments like this?   Crickets.  Nada.  Vance continues:

As the student prattled on… I thought about my friends who were covered in third-degree burns, ‘lucky’ to have survived an IED attack in the Al-Qaim region of Iraq. And here was this dipshit in a spotty beard telling our class that we butchered people for sport. I felt an immediate drive to finish college as quickly as possible.  I met with a guidence counselor and plotted my exit.

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Faced with interpersonal conflict, Vance plotted his exit and fled. 

In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance reflects honestly on how his family taught him to fight or to flee, but only in his personal life.  Fighting was what his mother, grandmother, great grandmother, grandfather and uncles did. Vance actually speaks with some reverence for them as “enforcers of hillbilly justice” (17). However, fleeing is what they did to survive when the fighting got too bad. These became his learned responses to conflict.  Reflecting in the act of storytelling, Vance admits how destructive fighting was to himself as a boy longing for stability. Without another alternative in school or at home, Vance habitually fled.  His girlfriend (now wife)

stumbled upon an analogy that described me perfectly. I was, she said, a turtle. “Whenever something bad happers—even a hint of disagreement—you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in.” It was true. I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all. I could scream at her when she did something I didn’t like, but that seemed mean. Or I could withdraw and get away. Those were the proverbial arrows in my quiver, and I had nothing else.

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What schooling—from Kindergarten through high school, college, and law school—failed to give J.D. Vance were strategies for handling disagreements in ways that preserved relationships.  Both civic relationships and intimate ones matter.  They are vital as the air we breathe. Indeed, having clean air to breathe and relaxed lungs to breathe it literally requires them.