My youngest daughter started a new High school this week……..because she was tired and defeated by being a nameless face in a crowd, a number on a form……her siblings were luckier, they went to smaller schools because of where we were living, but not so this youngest. I sent her dutifully to the local school…a local school for over 3,000 others…because I believe in the idea of state funded education, available to all….but in the end I did not agree to a Kafkaesque surreal experience that made my daughter feel the pointlessness of existence that should wait for a later age! Her youth had been sweet, so why not her adolescence too???
The change to smaller high school has been worth it…she came home wondrous that teachers remembered her name and spoke to her during breaks from class….she smiled again and is starting to find that she matters to others and thus is starting to matter to herself. Good. But honestly, isn’t it a shame that our system has become so unwieldy as to present our journeys with a loss of a sense of self. Do we exist if we have no tax file number…passport number…etc? Are we more than cogs in a very big wheel that turns unrelentlessly…with no time for us to look at ourselves or to hear our inner voices singing??
People's identity is rooted in their identifications; in what they associate themselves with. What a person associates him or herself with is ultimately who that person is, for all identity is ultimately in relationship to something else. Isn’t it time individuals had a relationship to something more than a tick in a box?
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