I hate how education has made me think there SHOULD be a plan, a structure to life, and that I’m made to feel that my exam results and not my humanity show my worth and decide my fate.
I don’t WANT to let that happen. It’s a clever system and works for people whose paths can run along that way and work like that but mine just CAN’T.
I am not made of intelligence and passing exams. I am made of passion and words, not formulae and theories. I am made of star dust from a gazillion miles and years away in a random part of the beautiful infinity of the Universe, so don’t tell me that there’s a limit to what I can achieve or be when the sky isn’t even high enough.
I don’t want to be seen as a person to develop the human world further, I want to look more closely into what’s happening in the present, and hear all the stories of the past that the world has to offer so that I can understand the state we are in now.
I don’t want to sit and learn textbooks, I want to go and be told the information by people all over the world that could write entire textbooks on what is just one page in our education system.
I’m not a geographer, a chemist or a biologist. I never will be. I don’t like that just because I have taken those subjects I have those titles haunting me. I don’t even want English to define me. I am not a combination of school subjects set out in a world where they NEED me to learn.
I am me and I will learn where and when I want to. I am not stupid if I can’t learn a textbook, and intelligence is not a measure of my worth. Intelligence is one value among an infinity of others and I will not let my ‘intelligence’ define me. I want to be defined by the hope I have in just being yourself, the courage I hold believing that in being yourself you will get somewhere, and the wisdom I will acquire in a lifetime of wanting to experience all I can. I am not a robot and I refuse to willingly be defined by the seventeen years AND COUNTING that I have felt trapped by textbooks and exams. I’m not part of the box, I’m not a bolt in the instruction manual of ‘how to succeed in this day and age’ and I refuse to confine if that is what’s expected of me.
The anger I feel at even thinking about being controlled by qualifications is evidence that though I may go through with sixth form – hell, I may even go to Uni and let my life be ripped apart before my eyes only to find a new one that will be ripped apart in only a few more years time – even if I do allow that to happen, I plan to change the person that I will have been defined as by then. I’m sick of thinking ‘just a few years more of this shit’ because education is supposed to be ‘a love for something’, but I feel no true passion when I’m being judged.
Education FEELS like a transect, where each set quadrat is another test or change that could make or break you. I’m sick of feeling like that and waiting in terror for the next quadrat to be set down.
The Universe & Emma 