After two years of lockdowns and conforming to ‘public health advice’, and going along with the crowd, and another year of my first child being swept up into the public eduction system and my concerns being met with outright hostility, I’m suddenly and shockingly conscious once more of who I am, my purpose (I’m actually a writer, and NOT a stay-at-home mother), and why our government system is so incredibly broken – particularly at the education level.
It’s really all too simple, and it’s always talked about but never acted on. Why? Because this system benefits from people being caught inside not knowing where to go in society. Because the Government is anti-business, anti-corporation, and anti anything outside of Government policy and propaganda.
I grew up in a small town in Newcastle, Australia, and was an incredibly creative and sensitive child. I quickly took to writing, crafts, music, culture and the arts, and ended up an orchestral musician before deciding to make the switch to literature, poetry and writing. My downfall, however, was being swept up in the belief that I needed something ‘to fall back on’ as an arts degree was unthinkable, and my parents, namely my father, told me to do teaching. Job security and all that. My folly – and I was complicity in this deception, I suppose, in my nativity and innocence – was to go ahead and put my fate and my determination into his hands, and so after a four year teaching degree, I emerged as an incredibly knowledgable but extremely miserable teacher. I was displaced.
I assert that belonging is a key component in generating happy, healthy human beings, and paramount in actualisation. Actualisation is the process by which one becomes one’s most fully developed and highest self, and is the final stage of human development according to psychologist Abraham Maslow. It is indeed a need, and a need that all humans strive to have met. However, because of the broken and unjust public education system, many students inside this system will fail to achieve actualisation and will continue life in unsatisfying jobs, relationships and phases that they seemingly cannot outgrow. Why? Because the public education system fails to cater to individuality, particularly creative students, and it conditions children into adults who put up with things that make them discontent and to quote maxims such as “that’s life”, “you can’t have everything,” or “you just have to do what you have to do.”
I repel such complacency and defeatism. This is the antithesis not only of determinism but of democracy, where our democratic right is freedom. Freedom of expression is everything, because if you cannot safely express yourself, then how are you ever to know what is in your heart and soul? How are you ever to understand your purpose in life if you are simply assigned one and told to go along with the consensus?
The problem with this broken system of education is that those who are engineering it are, to put it bluntly, distinctly conformist, and sadly unenlightened. The system overall is not child-centred; rather, it is policy centred. It quashes the creative arts. It stifles imagination, joy and exploration. And it perpetuates the myth that in order to be successful in life, you need to prove your worth by doing that which is socially permissible or ‘normal’. All this achieves is a dispiriting mediocrity to which no child’s essence aspires.
This is a bit of an open letter of blame, I suppose, and I am pointing the finger at public education and those who believe in its ‘for the greater good’ agenda. It is not for the greater good to shepherd people into jobs that kill their sense of self and engender a corrosiveness of spirit that culminates in mental and physical illness. It is not for the greater good to prevent any human being from achieving their higher purpose. I do not believe so. I believe in a system of education that appreciates, validates and nurtures uniqueness and individuality. I believe in a system of education that enables students to explore and discover parts of themselves, and where they may imagine where those capabilities and talents may take them. I do not support a system that shames, manipulates and controls through force or other forms of coercion.
Like everything in life, education should be about connections and relationships, trust and respect, and now, as I finally remember who it is that I am once more, after being told by the Government that all I can be is a mother whose own needs don’t matter, I finally close the door on public education, on all the pain that it has caused me. Whilst I do love my children, I also love my own self, and Self Love is something that is never advocated for by public education or even our Government (did you ever read any form of advertisement promoting wellbeing, connection, self care, or Self Love during the pandemic?). It is with a great big sigh of relief that I finally take strong determined action, and pull my child – and my own inner child – from its soul crushing clasp, forever.
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