All I Need to Know about Life I Learned in Elementary School
No seriously. Read on. I feel like my elementary-school experience taught me everything about society that is worth knowing. I've just spent the last 30+ years learning the nuances. This is a pretty pessimistic post, but the last eight years have shown me that my belief that humans were basically good was entirely wrong. And I think that my major mistake was turning twelve without internalizing this message. (I blame Star Trek lol, and I can't think of any other piece of media that gave humanity so much false hope.) This is what I learned: 1. Most people who have maximum social privilege don't give a shit about anyone else.
Unless that "anyone else" is in their same social/economic group (and most often only if they're also white or willing to carry water for white supremacy). I saw this play out when I was a kid. I wasn't part of the dominant religious culture in my state, which meant that no one saw me or my family at Sunday services. In fact, I was probably the only person in most of my classes who wasn't part of the dominant religion. Therefore, I was not human; I was a thing to be abused, whose pain wasn't real and could therefore be ignored. But I also saw the same mistreatment happen to kids who were part of the dominant religion...but who were any combination of poor, fat, neurodivergent, traumatized, from abusive homes, learning disabled, or physically disabled. Ableism, the dominant religion, classism, neuro-supremacy, fatphobia/lookism, and society's interest in ignoring child abuse conspired to keep the powerful in power and to remind the have-nots to stay in our place. (If my school had had more than two Black kids who I didn't know well and who were never in my classes, I suspect race would've been a widespread factor too--rather than one that only applied to those two kids.) Yes, it was the 80s. But being "a different time" doesn't excuse the fact that families taught their children (directly or by inaction) to be cruel to those with less social cache, and the fact that the adults who served in loco parentis enabled it. Teachers and staff either gave no shits about peer-on-peer abuse, or, if they did, their attempts to stop it were well intentioned but ultimately ineffective. Because they were going against a system designed to elevate the privileged and damage the underprivileged. This essay's difficult to write, so I'll have to take it one part at a time. Stay tuned for more.



















