I am a part of an education system where teachers tell students to not write hefty vocabulary in their English answers because the teachers cannot understand it.
I am a part of an education system where my love for language and learning is surpassed by a rat race choked with competition and pressure.
Is it even about learning anymore?
Is it not just about passing?
Passing till you top the most gruesome entrance exams in the world, passing till you reach the top university of the country, passing till you secure that white-collar job in that multi-million dollar company, passing till you have a mental breakdown and cannot cope up with the failure and then, failing. Failing until your brain is in a rattrap of suicidal thoughts.
Why the hell are people not scared, not choking with fear to even envision that society forces the students to believe that how well you do in your teenage years will determine your whole life?
I don’t know a lot of things but I certainly know that there is a fucking huge difference between a healthy amount of challenge to do better and being so stressed about school that you breakdown and cry.
Students in schools are all open textbooks and closed minds.
They are not allowed to write what they think if it is against the ideologies of a textbook written by a person who is not a feminist, a homophobic and does not know the difference between equality and equity.
I don’t know about other schools but my school gave us sex education like it was just a trivial biological scientific evolution and not an important social expression and an identity.
I was 15 years old going through a sexuality crisis when the “Reproduction in Animals” chapter read, “Here’s how you prevent STDs? Wear contraceptives and don’t promote homosexuality.”
Forget discussing sexual orientations or romantic orientations or different gender identities, our school textbooks said that homosexuality gives you STDs.
100 points to Heteronormativity, 1000 points to Homophobia, and -5000 points to Respecting Identities.
And people say school is the home for learning?
A home that never taught the young minds that being homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, pansexual, asexual, non-binary and the whole spectrum and umbrella of other genderqueer or romantic identities does not mean you are broken.
Because you are not, not broken. You exist, you belong, you are loved. You are not broken, dammit.
The school did ingrain the fear of academic excellence in my brain but at one point it also ingrained the fear of my own identity in my goddamn soul.
Fearing yourself is the worst kind of fear because it does not let you live yet pulls you back from dying, It is like carrying the burden of your soul and hanging over a cliff but you never fall in the jaws of death.
But nobody cares about it, right? Nobody cares about acceptance or even the reason why we need to ask acceptance. Nobody cares about respecting the identities of others, their ideologies, their mad-hatter crazy imaginations, and the magical portal through which they view this world.
They teach us secularism and equality’s constitutional definition but differentiate between the genders in class. Nobody cares about how you treat other humans. Heck, nobody cares about how education is about being a good human.
Nobody cares because numbers matter. Numbers matter. Numbers matter more than your lives, from test papers to weighing machines. We step around the kids having panic attacks in hallways. We become the kids having panic attacks in hallways. Our parents see the straight A’s on report cards and not the purple moons stamped under both our eyes after countless all-nighters.
We slaughter our creativity to revise quadratic formulas and covalent bonds. We know the Pythagorean Theorem by heart, but short-circuit when asked, “How are you?” We don’t know. We don’t know because that wasn’t on the study guide. We usually know the answer, but rarely know ourselves because nobody cares.
Nobody cares if you’ve been crying all night as long as you get the chemical reactions right. Nobody cares if you’ve been lying in bed all day long your body frozen as long as you know Newton’s Laws of Motion. Nobody ever talks about the aching in your heart as long as you’re thorough with its anatomy and the fact that it has four chambers.
So, don’t tell me schools are the home for learning. They are not and people are surprised why children are homesick for a place that does not exist.
So, the next time they ask you, “why do you hate schools?”
Because we need closed textbooks, open minds.
Because we need healthy and happy children who believe that the home for learning is a place where they can proudly say that their identity matters. It is a home where people are proud, smiling wide and waving rainbow flags and their address is no longer a closet.
Because we need people who care, care about their ideas and imaginations and physical, mental, and emotional health and not just about numbers.
Education is not numbers, it was never numbers.
Education is just a guide where we all learn how to be the bits and pieces of pixie dust left in this tattered world.
Education is just a guide that whispers within my soul, “Be a good human, darling because humanity is in ruins. Be a good human because you care.”
And suddenly I am home. ~ enigma
