They keep saying experience is everything and I’m mighty sick of it.
I understand rules. Rules allow people to coexist without beating on each other for the simplest things. Rules keep the world turning as it is, and some might say that isn’t necessarily a good thing but a lot of the time it’s better than the alternative.
The thing about believing that rules are essential is that it’s so easy to be consumed by them. One day a society puts in laws and the people are happier because the law supports the majority–isn’t that what laws are made to do?
However, in the event that such a society implements such laws, it becomes obvious when something else is vitally wrong with the function of the society. Perhaps a man overshadows his neighbor, stealing from him, abusing him verbally, and so the lawmakers set out to fix it. Although in the beginning, a law is put in effect to liberate the wronged, in the end the laws are made more for the betterment of the majority than the minority. Eventually the minority has no voice at all. It is overshadowed by this great democracy, these leaders who claim to know best, but they forget that they don’t know all.
“I find the world funny because if I shouldn’t, it would surely break my heart.”
It’s not arrogance. I know that there are those who set rules intending only for the good of the people. What they forget–what most people forget to take into account–is the individual.
“Society exists only as a mental concept. In the real world there are only individuals” -Oscar Wilde
My grief is with the way high school is run. And truly, I would write for day and night, write about everything I feel is wrong with it, about every injustice and paradox and mistreatment if I thought it would do a lick of good. I would join the Student Council if I thought they were given any voice in the setting of such rules and behaviors, if I thought they did anything but plan dances and raise money.
The truth? Most parents–that I’ve met, who I know are out there–don’t care about their kid’s voice because they’ve had to speak for them for so long. It’s a fantastic idea, that there is any such thing as a human being created from another human being. A miracle, even.
In the course of raising a kid what most parents forget is that the kid is a person, too. The parent may sit by the child’s side while he/she does their first math problem and feel such pride. They may attend every soccer game, every chess tournament or cheer routine but in the end it is the easiest thing in the world to forget that perhaps, it is not them doing these things but the parent through the kid.
And when setting rules and pushing for laws, they forget, in their need to protect and control, that perhaps the safest thing is not always the best thing.
I won’t say they never stop to consider how the kid would feel if his or her right to drive at 16 were taken away, because maybe some parents would. All I will say is, in the course of pushing for such regulations the voice of the minority affected is hardly heard at all.
Last year I was a member of my school’s Student Council. I signed up, thinking, “Wow! This way, I can make a difference. I can have a say in how things are run.” What I didn’t know was that I can talk my heart out and it will never make a difference, not to this school board, because to them I am just a teenager and what do teenagers know?
If there is a clearer vision than any, it is of those who have not had the chance to be blinded. At least, not yet.
Today, riding home on the bus, I noticed the new security measures. A camera at both the front, back, and middle of the bus. We had to have our IDs to get on and off, and there was a monitor constantly moving down the aisle, watching. Watching for what?
The truth? The truth is that it does not matter that every one of the kids who ride my bus is perfectly behaved, every single day. People–parents, the ones who control the school board–are scared. They’ve seen the videos of shootings, heard of the grief of the families. After such incidents, the families are driven to sue. Sue, sue the school for making my child this way! Sue the school for not stopping this! Sue the teachers and the staff and anyone who even glanced in the direction of their child before they were killed!
In all that blame, all those accusations, they say the heart is the students who were murdered. What they don’t say is that it isn’t the fault of the school. It isn’t the fault of the killer’s peers, or the gun company that made the gun, or even the security guard who was too late to do anything. So who’s to blame?
Everyone, because everyone plays a part. The friends, who push some loner kid into doing something humiliating. Perhaps that is even the catalyst, that final shove off the cliff. There’s the teachers; but really, it isn’t their fault they must teach objectives all year long rather than expression. And most definitely, there are the parents because with each generation comes new ideals and standards. The majority of parents are stuck in the past. They don’t remember how it didn’t matter that there were no seat belts because their friends thought their car was awesome. For a while, that was all that mattered.
But now, schools–high schools in particular–do not teach kids how to live. They teach kids how to survive.
“I never let my learning interfere with my education” -(mark twain?)
The way I see it, there are two ways a future school education can go. It can go the way of the school board and the parents. It can be strict minutes. Every second is counted, every error docked in order to “get a better understanding of the needs of the children.” Every rule ever created is created by people who do not have to live by the standards.
For example. I was in Algebra II class–first day of school–and the teacher hands us index cards so we can write down information about ourselves. Alright. So I write my name…my email…my home phone number…and then it asks for my address. Why does she need my address? Oh, well. So I write that down, too.
The lady calls the class to attention and starts going over the syllabus. She begins to talk about what she likes, why she teaches–really, for so long that my page fills up with doodles but I don’t interrupt. Then some kid at the back of the room raises his hand and asks where she lives (because in my town, where a person lives is a huge discussion topic–it’s either close to the mall or far from it).
“I’m not going to tell you where I live!” the teacher told us.
And then it struck me how utterly rude that is. The first thing my English teacher ever told us was that she wouldn’t ever ask of us what she would not be willing to answer herself. Isn’t that like, one of the most important things with such a relationship?
Well, that did it for me. I was fed up with it. Everything.
My English teacher is possibly the only one I truly think understands. The district assigns us essay after essay after essay until I want to strangle someone with my bare hands. ”Someone” being a school board member, of course. Possibly all of them.
Anyway, rather than simply assigning those essays, she makes them easier to take by doing creative things in between; i.e. letting us free write, have a discussion, etcetera. The bellworks always connect to ourselves, how we feel about an issue–not what the issue is, but our opinion of it.
Say what?? An opinion? Heavens forbid a high school student should ever have an opinion!
There are consequences no one but the very observant and a few kids will ever realize. See, such essays as we write have guidelines. Format, lines, spaces, citations, titles–there has to be an exact format when writing such essays as the ones we write. And in the process, I’ve lost what it means to go into an English classroom and wonder if all those problems I’ve been thinking about; how I’ll express them today.
It has come to it that classes like English and History are no longer about seeing mistakes or giving our views, but of interpreting in only the right way, and writing in just one form. When has it become that the only things the district wants students to know is what they need to make a living? They say it is so we can be successful in life but what kid, who only knows structure and rules, will ever be content with that?
There is such unhappiness there. Truly, no one wants to be just a crowd. Just a student. Just a group, a minority, one with no voice because supposedly that voice will never be wise or right. Perhaps that is why kids follow the trends. Because possibly, if we’re all alike and we all think similarly, we will become exactly what our parents and the school board (one in the same) expect of a group of teenagers.
If getting older means forgetting what it means to be younger, I won’t ever grow up. Not if I have to stay in school my whole life or work at McDonalds, or write essays. What do I want to see? I want to see each of those board members go through exactly the same process that we do.
The other way future education can go is a very unlikely path, considering the people in charge. Creativity; freedom of expression; a voice; where have they gone? There could be a school where the kids confer with experience in order to determine what they need. Whoever said “kids don’t know what they need” needs to spend a week in teenage shoes. A week being told there is nothing they can ever do to change what they are told.
I like that English teacher. Her bellwork questioned us, “Have you made a mark on the world?” and I was unhappy to say, no. I haven’t. But I intend to, even if it means always being the minority.
