Schools & Education - Wake The Fuck Up!

I have done some talks and workshops in schools recently, and am part of an organization that works with troubled youths, trying to help them see that the world is bigger than the bully in the playground.

But the bully isn't just in the playground. He's in the staff room. He's in the system.

I met this girl today who told me her dream. To be a singer and actor. She's never told anyone that before because when you're thirteen and you tell people you want to sing and act they think you're insane.

They don't like insane in society. They don't like ideas and dreamers. They wanna teach us maths and science, even when we hate maths and science. All they teach most of us is how to add up how low our paychecks are and then how to set fire to them with a Bunsen burner.

There was this other kid who we met because he's the 'bad kid', which is code for 'black' and 'gets restless during French lessons'. We gave him a folder and said "make it your own." We thought he'd write his name and class number. Instead he designed graffiti. It was amazing, and he did it for the other student's folders too. 

But schools don't get that. They think singing and graffiti don't lead to a career but knowing 3.14 is Pi does.

I was 12 years old and I was exactly how I am now, but less tall. My English teacher told me "Writing isn't your skill, find something else". It hurt. But she was my teacher. I didn't write for fun again for five years, and school was a nightmare.

I lost five years of my growth as a writer and it's because my teacher said I can't do it, and I believed her. 

It's time to wake the fuck up. The talent of young people is getting squandered. It's hard to be an entrepreneur from a prison cell, or from behind the counter at the supermarket. By then most people are dead. Because when you have big dreams the system doesn't allow you to exist.

And the system is broken. Half the people aren't working. I know geniuses who went to university because that's what was insisted, and now they work part time doing admin in the back offices of shoe shops. Everything is fucked yet we still make them call the teachers "Sir" and we still make them read shit that has nothing to do with who they are.

It's time for the educators of our young to wake the fuck up. I don't know how we do it. But the world is changing. Our young people are Facebooking and developing iPhone apps. It's different now. But still the artists suffer. 

That girl today was so shy about wanting to sing. It doesn't HAVE to be that way. That shyness isn't nature--- its growing up and having to push your aspirations so far inwards that pretty soon you convince yourself that not only do you not want to sing, but you really want that extra shoe shop shift.

I've got nothing against the shoe shop. I just know that people have bigger dreams. It's hard enough if you know what you're doing and have resources; but when your teachers, schoolfriends and everyone around you is forced to be exactly the same as everyone else, you get oppressed. You get stuck at home.

The world is a giant place, dreams come true. But we can't keep killing it at such a young age. Because how you are at 14 is usually how you are forever. Let's make it about possibilities and uniqueness. 

It's down to us as individuals -- as teachers, parents and teenagers. But there are also larger forces. Our governments, the men in grey suits who run the schools, and God knows who else. School is a place to learn, to have your mind opened to the possibilities. It's almost never the thing I just said. We need to change that.

Wake the fuck up.