(Author’s note: This article was supposed to be published in comic sans so pretend that worked out)
For the most important time in our lives, when we’re growing up and learning to navigate the world, we’re corralled into bland and sterile cells where we are forced to sit down, shut up, face forward, and listen to the adults in power ramble about various subjects and make sure that we memorize it all. Not learn about it, memorize it. We’re not expected to analyze, interact, or ponder the information, just regurgitate it. At the same time, these lectures and drills impose expectations of what is “normal.” How things are, why they are this way, the “normal” ways to navigate the system and change it by participating in it and following its rules. If we were really learning and therefore able to critically look at these lessons, we’d realize how fucking dumb it really is. How doing things “normally” isn’t going to improve our situation or fundamentally alter the systems that keep us down.
