Kerry Anderson may someday be the President of the United States. She’s got the educational pedigree, at least, having graduated from Harvard and now contemplating law school — what’s interesting about all this is that according to the feature interview NPR All Things Considered cohost Michele Norris conducted with Kerry Anderson Wednesday, Anderson is the daughter of a long-hauling mother who schooled her daughter in large part from the sleeper cab of her truck.
“A lot of our schooling actually was integrated into what she was doing,” Anderson told Norris. “When we knew where we were going — Texas to California, for instance — we had to map out the mileage. We had to map out when we had to fuel, how fast we were going to be going, where we needed to stop, rest areas, all of that kind of thing, what our fuel mileage was going to be.”
Supplemented by a mail-in testing and schoolwork program, Anderson’s primary education might well be considered to have been in the culture of the road, where one learns how to exist in the wider world of people, writ large. She told Norris that, after two years in community college and her recruitment to Harvard, where she finished school, she missed “the total culture. It’s a different culture. You meet different kinds of people, and you get to see different kinds of you hear different stories and things like that, and I miss that. It’s a different thing you don’t get sitting in a classroom.”
Find the full story, and audio, here.
