An Open Letter to School

This is a letter to all the schools I went through and spent time in demoralization, spiritual abuses, and self-condemnation

Dear School,

This is indeed long overdue, and I have been reluctant to share this with you and the world. Not because I was afraid, but because I did not want to linger on my past mistakes. However, as I’m now a father, I feel much more strongly about this as I got through nightmares of my daughter being educated by the likes of you. I hope this finds you, but more importantly, I strongly hope it finds someone who had been tortured by or is about to get into the trap set by you.

Here are some remembering moments to jog your memory.

When I was in primary school, I was already better in English than most students because I was educated by foreigners in my family-owned kindergarten. It was a Thai language class (I remember thinking why should there be a class dedicated to a language that wasn’t applicable elsewhere). I was summoned to the chalkboard to spell out the world technology in Thai. Since I knew in English it was pronounced “tek·naa·luh·jee”, I easily scribbled the Thai equivalence on the board, grimaced, half-expecting for a standing ovation.

To my surprise, it was humiliatingly incorrect. The teacher giggled, sending the whole class to follow suit. In a few seconds, I became the laughing stock holding chalk in front of the class. The teacher came over, erased my writing, and replace it with a Thai spelling that sounded “tek·no·lo·yee”. I was very young, and I did not have any resilience to shame, so I picked up and carried with me the weight of that embarrassment for years.

Only years later that I realized they were wrong. The word was taken literally from English, which means there should not be a right or wrong spelling in Thai as long as it’s pronounced correctly. The teacher’s version did not even get the sound right. At the very least, my version of spelling could have opened up a whole lot more interesting discussion around language derivations and culture blending. If only the teacher knew.

A different turn of the event could have made me a more confident, fearless kid who grab life by the horns. Instead, I became a frustrated introvert kid throughout my secondary school years. It only took an ignorant adult you put up to curb us to take away years of liveliness from a child’s life.

Fast forward to college, my sophomore year in the Faculty of Dogmatic Western Architecture, I was presenting a museum design using an experimental collage medium inspired by the work of Paul Klee to a group of the jury when one of them, a conservative instructor, marked me down with a comment, “I can’t see a column. This is not architecture.” Fair enough, he was teaching traditional architecture and history and I was forced to forgive him for his backward regressive mentality. But the fact that he was the most senior figure in the jury meant that his aloof destructive remark had more than influenced his peers’ decision to grade me down as well. I think I got a C.

In the end, after about thirty minutes of hell which felt like a lifetime, everyone left the room except me, who sat on the chair feeling lifeless and another instructor on the jury who was also my advisor, approached me and said, “I liked what you did, but it’s not what we do here.”

Pardon me? Who is we? I thought education was supposed to be about me.

What the heck is wrong with you, School, giving refuge to these intellectual criminals? Were all the tuition being spent on boosting these people’s ego in condemning the differences? That one was a huge blow to my soul. Effectively, you and your mundane, western-cloned dogma had killed my inner sun just because you felt your idealism was more important than being actual teachers.

Not to mention the junior year, a head instructor at the same faculty (who is now the dean) had enjoyed himself verbally abusing juniors (“Like puke,” he once described aloud one of the design work done by a student). Fortunately for you, my peers, most of whom had already been brewed from the earlier days of their life by the likes of you, took him as a celebrity because no one was ever taught that that was wrong, and our parents had never been taught to prioritize their children’s character over scoring as much as possible on your senseless exams in order to earn a privileged status in the society (“How’s your report card?” They’d ask).

So I got fed up. I decided to conduct a little hack. An experiment to my hypothesis. I did the following:

• Mindlessly picked the front row to sit in every class your minion taught
• Looked them in the eye and nodded to approve their ego (I’m listening)
• Complete all the assignments the way everyone did
• Mindlessly share lecture notes with my peers
• Pay to get photocopies of the “model” peers’ lecture notes
• Stop thinking

My GPA went up by 30% in just one semester. Therefore, I had proven my hypothesis. What you were doing was militarizing students.

To add to the damage, the education I spent so much of my time and my parents’ money on getting from you did not help in my career. Why would it? It never taught me virtue, character, and all the qualities I so needed to pick myself up again and again in the real world. Above all, it did not even touch the meaning of doing what I love. After a few years of trials and errors, I found what I loved doing — programming computers. It started with drawing simple shapes, then interactive ones, then programming switches and lights, then soldering and breaking things, then writing software. Computers, as they turned out to be, were the better teachers. They did not try to demoralize me in the face of their ego. They just give consistent feedback. Programming gave me back my purpose, the one you took away.

For the qualities and characters, I attended the School of Restaurant’s Basement and School of Grocery Store on 14th St, New York. In both places, I learned humility, teamwork, compassion, customer service, and resilience. After all, I got my pride back in those schools.

So, School, have I learned anything from you at all? Yes, in fact, I have. Years as a captive within your syndicate only taught me one thing — Only the weak hold on to tradition and enforce it on younger people because they aren’t big enough to stand tall against changes, or for that matters, being corrected. They gang up and bully those with different views instead of engaging in meaningful, forward arguments because they are afraid of being challenged and becoming irrelevant.

Lastly, I want to shout out to all those who are or were being mistreated and made to feel excluded by educational institutions like you — You are the rare blooms School never deserve. Do not let anyone dictate you or coerce you into who you are not, because you are the one who knows yourself best. Formal education is just that — Formality. Formality gives birth to nothing but uniformity on which only the privileged will thrive. What you are being catered to might just be keeping you from recognizing your potential.

I find comfort in the fact that soon you will wither with time and your tightly-held trophies of the past will be the only belongings you get to take to your grave as the new school of common sense and creativity arises in the face of the future that favors the resilience and the global-minded. If they adapt well, embrace hard work, and, most importantly, never give up and stop learning, they are bound for something exponentially greater than your petty certificates could ever granted them.

They are bound to reap the rewards of life.

Truly Yours,

Joe

Originally posted at BETA School, where I write to disrupt conventional schooling and about things I had to unlearn and relearn in real life - basically anything from tech, entrepreneurship, culture, moral, relationship, parenting, and more. If you would like to receive my writings in your inbox, please subscribe to my newsletter.