Another Brick in the Wall
While my parents have ceased their subscription to the local propaganda rag, going on FB today I immediately ran into two local stories of stupid school principals: One of a girls' school who was making three students wear wigs after they had donated their hair to kids with cancer, on the grounds that their new hairstyle (ie. bald) was punk and unladylike; and another from a mum whose kid had been suspended from school, without reasons given, but that she'd discovered, after much digging, was due to her son having mild autism. It galls me to even type this out, and thankfully people have chimed in with stories of better school principals and schools where attitudes are completely different.
When I was going through school in Singapore, I had terrible luck with school principals--they were always the ultra-strict conservative ones with very narrow views on How Things Should Be. I mostly kept out of trouble, but it was a bitter point for me for YEARS that as soon as I graduated and left these schools for another, the principal whom I had hated would be changed for someone who was more open-minded--but too late for me. I would always get to hear about how these schools greatly expanded their art programs and had kinder rules--AFTER I left. So some leftover gripe and bitterness came up this morning. I enjoyed (BLISSFULLY enjoyed) my college years in the US, but it's almost tragic that I really hated almost all my schooling years and teachers in Singapore. I was not one to visit ex-teachers on Teachers' Day, nor think about giving them gifts. Because mostly I just remembered the ones who bullied me and other students, the ones who couldn't answer my questions, the ones who were racist, the ones who were sexist, and the ones who marked my essays in red text about how I'd made up the word "millennium". I didn't challenge them just to challenge them, but the response was always that I was not showing them respect. And once that charge was leveled against me, I truly had no respect, and trying to pull Confucius/"Asian values" on me (ie. "respect your elders") only got me more infuriated.
It's something I have to come to terms with, and I suppose, but it is a bit painful that I went through the same school years as others (my ex-classmates and ex-schoolmates) with a completely different experience--I do not enjoy thinking back on most of my schooling years, while others can recall the same teachers and school principals fondly. (Maybe it's just a thing artists or people with Aquarius ascendants have to deal with.) The lasting effect on me is that, well, I still greatly dislike a lot of my ex-teachers and school principals, and I feel I have an immediate understanding of all conservative authority figures mindlessly touting "Asian values", if only from my schooling experiences of them--and that mental image has always proved to be 100% accurate when anticipating conservative responses in online social debates. I am so, so ready for some old ways of thinking and doing things to go. For stuck-in-the-mud authority figures to go. Age doesn't make you right. Power and authority doesn't make you right. The right thing to do is decided by the heart, not the number attached to one's age, or a job title. I think the young have as much to teach as their elders, and it is the young who will inherit the world. And I'd prefer the world to be run with compassion and creativity, and not mindless obedience and paranoia.
And I hereby state the intention to claim the hurt bits of myself from my schooling years back. If my role was to challenge you teachers from my past, then I hope I did it well, even at the emotional costs to myself. I forgive the ones who hurt me, and release this pain. Let others now carry on the lesson. They're doing it pretty well.
When I was going through school in Singapore, I had terrible luck with school principals--they were always the ultra-strict conservative ones with very narrow views on How Things Should Be. I mostly kept out of trouble, but it was a bitter point for me for YEARS that as soon as I graduated and left these schools for another, the principal whom I had hated would be changed for someone who was more open-minded--but too late for me. I would always get to hear about how these schools greatly expanded their art programs and had kinder rules--AFTER I left. So some leftover gripe and bitterness came up this morning. I enjoyed (BLISSFULLY enjoyed) my college years in the US, but it's almost tragic that I really hated almost all my schooling years and teachers in Singapore. I was not one to visit ex-teachers on Teachers' Day, nor think about giving them gifts. Because mostly I just remembered the ones who bullied me and other students, the ones who couldn't answer my questions, the ones who were racist, the ones who were sexist, and the ones who marked my essays in red text about how I'd made up the word "millennium". I didn't challenge them just to challenge them, but the response was always that I was not showing them respect. And once that charge was leveled against me, I truly had no respect, and trying to pull Confucius/"Asian values" on me (ie. "respect your elders") only got me more infuriated.
It's something I have to come to terms with, and I suppose, but it is a bit painful that I went through the same school years as others (my ex-classmates and ex-schoolmates) with a completely different experience--I do not enjoy thinking back on most of my schooling years, while others can recall the same teachers and school principals fondly. (Maybe it's just a thing artists or people with Aquarius ascendants have to deal with.) The lasting effect on me is that, well, I still greatly dislike a lot of my ex-teachers and school principals, and I feel I have an immediate understanding of all conservative authority figures mindlessly touting "Asian values", if only from my schooling experiences of them--and that mental image has always proved to be 100% accurate when anticipating conservative responses in online social debates. I am so, so ready for some old ways of thinking and doing things to go. For stuck-in-the-mud authority figures to go. Age doesn't make you right. Power and authority doesn't make you right. The right thing to do is decided by the heart, not the number attached to one's age, or a job title. I think the young have as much to teach as their elders, and it is the young who will inherit the world. And I'd prefer the world to be run with compassion and creativity, and not mindless obedience and paranoia.
And I hereby state the intention to claim the hurt bits of myself from my schooling years back. If my role was to challenge you teachers from my past, then I hope I did it well, even at the emotional costs to myself. I forgive the ones who hurt me, and release this pain. Let others now carry on the lesson. They're doing it pretty well.