The Miseducation of Model Minorities: The ‘Gospel of Schoolvation’ and the Myth of the Schooled Society

The ‘model minority,’ the phenomenon of some ‘minority’ communities (or some members within them) achieving social and economic advancement despite encountering the difficulties of assimilating into a mainstream society, is often described as a myth, especially as one of the central problematics in Asian American studies. Usually, the modern use of the word myth is pejorative: the model minority in this sense refers to a false empirical description of some minorities and should be quantitatively disaggregated and qualitatively debunked. In this paper, I want to explore the model minority as another kind of myth, in the classical sense of mythos, a story that underwrites action in the world, making sense of a society’s activities and justifying the existence of its institutions. In this way, my method in this paper takes after what Sam Rocha calls the ‘pre-qualitative work’ of ontological inquiry that must come prior to the acts of qualitative fieldwork. My theological move will be to show that the mythos of the model minority narrates what Rocha has called in Folk Phenomenology a ‘gospel of “schoolvation,”’ a message directed at minorities that schools will be their salvation from social and economic ostracization from the mainstream. I will move in three parts, first describing what the myth is, second to outline the theological power of the mythology, and third to engage Gary Okihiro’s 2016 text Third World Studies on how the legacy of the Third World Liberation Front might be mobilized to overcome it.