(Part I of a two or three part series on formal education.)

I’m at my high school, sitting in the gathering space — the hall where we had our weekly, school-wide assemblies. All my friends are there, and all my teachers. Guest speakers have come in. They are talking and talking, lecturing us about some subject, passing a microphone back and forth. They are saying something that infuriates me — some lie, some bigoted untruth that the teachers and administrators are nodding along to. I’m exchanging glances with my friends, my classmates, uneasy sideways glances as we slowly realize how wrong these lecturers are. They talk on and on and it gets only worse, I get angrier and angrier. I raise my hand to speak but they ignore it. My hand is up for what feels like hours, until my arm is shaking and exhausted and my face contorted. I start to yell, begging to be allowed to speak. I need to speak. I know that no one will correct these liars if I don’t and I can’t let them talk like that to my friends, to all these kids. I love these kids and I can’t let them do this. But they ignore me. I start screaming, and I’m crying, choking around my sentences, my pathetic little points that I need to make so badly. I need only to say them, to be heard. How can they make us sit here like this? Forced to gag on their sentences and not allowed to feel anything, not allowed to respond.

This is when my teachers decide they have had enough of it. They grab my arms, my hair, my shoulders. They put duct tape over my mouth.

It’s more than a year already that I’ve been out of high school, but I have these dreams about once a week. That’s a more mild one. A few month ago I dreamt that the school administration was keeping us locked in rotting facilities on an isolated island a la Lost, and they performed surgeries on us when we were sleeping, putting machines into our bodies. My parents, both in their forties, still have high school nightmares, too.

These nightmares are evidence of trauma. I wake up crying, my hands stuck in tight fists. If my parents are any indication, I may have these nightmares all my life.

What the hell is going on here? What are we doing? What is this system, this methodology, that we refuse to break away from? It’s incredible to me — truly incredible — that virtually everyone has a horrible, permanently scarring experience in school, only to force their own children through the same thing.

In the next segment, I will explore the nature of formal education — what it is we’re actually doing here.

The title, by the way, comes from here.

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