Early to rise again. The Air is crisp and it’s Monday. The end of the school holidays and the kids will be up in a couple of hours. I made them pack all their lunches last night and get their bags ready so it wouldn’t be to stressful this morning. every so often I get the urge to pull them out of school and go back to home schooling them. I think school isn’t a healthy place for a child to grow up and learn how to be a copy of the society we currently have so we keep mass producing little clones of people who fit neatly in to pre determined molds based upon their School experience. Buy my eldest struggles with what she sees as unjust and sometimes has pointless rules that often are unforced. She’s intimidated by the teachers and feels like she can’t have a voice. This discussion started because of a book bag she was given and we have to pay for. She doesn’t see the need to put books into a bag and then put that bag in her school bag. Why not just a school bag? Indeed why not? You don’t have a book bag in secondary school so why do we need one in primary? My response is the same as hers, though mostly because I have to pay for it and never asked for it. In primary school it’s almost considered part of the uniform and treated the same. Have you got your book bag? Don’t forget your book bag. These are the years of early compliance where you are taught to follow the rules no matter how silly that seem and you learn to be fearful of questioning them. I try to get my child to stand up for what she believes and calling out something she sees as silly in a respectful way. But forcing people to comply with sometimes silly rules is what society is like isn’t it? Being bullied by those in authority, feeling like you don’t have a voice and sometimes being victimized when you stand up for what you believe. Where you are seen as a commodity or a market share in some sales agenda. A book bag coats $7 each.they are just a bit of canvas mass produced in China most likely. To me and my daughter it’s a scam and unnecessary. She shows me her school bag. I’ve had this bag since I first started school. It still works fine. Why do I need to put another bag inside it? I agree with her but I know that she has to learn to navigate this as we all did. Life isn’t always fair and sometimes the law is an ass and it seems much of the time it is applied more stringently to the poor and the voiceless and school will teach her to be cimplicet in the perpetuation of that system. So why do we do it to our kids? I heard in the states that more and more parants are pulling their children out of schools largely due to the new transgender rulls and the teachings associated with it. They don’t want their kids being told they are gay or steered down a path by adults when they are at an early developmental stage of life and vulnerable to pressure. I agree with them and I don’t see that there will be much of a choice if her school goes down the same path. One thing I have noticed more and more is that those who enforce rulls at the top rarely question these rules or the authority that creates them. Is this the result of public education? Is it here kids learn to fostor a society that steals your voice and imprisons your heart? Where you learn compliance is a game that you quit playing when you know no one is watching and enforce on others when they are?
What kind of creatures are we? It reminded me of the titanic where the gate keeper for the lower decks wouldn’t open the gates even though they we’re all going to drown and the band played, keeping the tempo everyone knew as there ship sank. So is it really just a book bag at the end of the day? Perhaps to me and you but to elizabeth it’s a sign of what’s to come.
