Tsu, the proof-vs-learning distinction is chef's kiss. Truly.
The startup I tried to build was around exactly that gap: not access, specifically --- the failure you're describing happens in expensive schools too. It's methodological; the system was never designed to measure whether something sparked. Only whether you could produce evidence that it had, under timed conditions, from memory, on demand.
& the lottery metaphor is the most honest thing I've read about revision. We called it studying. It was gambling. & the walk of shame when you'd picked wrong wasn't evidence of laziness. Rather, it was evidence of a system that mistook a blank page for a verdict.
Growing up near the economic bottom in the philippines, the reverence for education was real. But tbh I'm not sure it solved the problem. It might have just made the stakes of the lottery higher.
Thank you so much for reacting so deeply with this post. I remember reading about your start up actually. What a moving piece it was. Reflecting on education makes me so upset. Everytime I try to rant about it with people outside Substack, they say "but you need money for that, you can't overhaul the education system like that, it needs to be approved, it would take for ever etc.. ". So what's the solution then? Keeping it the same forever because it's too much hassle to change? Treating teachers like glorified baby sitters while the parents go to work? These are the most formative years of a human being, they can only live that period of their life once and this is the care they give to it. It's not good enough xx
100% on your point about the resistance to changing it; unfortunately the people who can, are already way too comfortable to bother most of the time & they often conveniently have their children in *good schools or done with school 🫠
This is still so relevant. As someone who works in a school I often feel like all we’re doing is keeping these kids alive in between drop off and home time and. Most of the things they’re learning will be so irrelevant to them. We’re just keeping them for 6 hours so their parents don’t go insane/can earn a wage.
I feel so honored that you recommended one of my essays to your readers. Thank you. It brought joy to me to know that the piece resonated soundly for you—and that you thought it might speak to others, too.
More important is what you wrote about the sad mismatch between the culture of your schooling and the summons of your soul. I know you were careful to say that you did not feel as a student like a member of an oppressed class, but it seems to me that, while not ideological or malicious, the school system walked right past the essential you, and didn’t seem to care. You describe this so well. I felt not only sad but also angry because this is not how schooling needs to be done! You may not have been a victim in any sort of brutal way. But I think your spirit was a victim. And for this, I offer my solace and my compassion.
Also, I have immense admiration for your bilingualism. I don’t know how you managed to become much more fluent and graceful in your English than the vast majority of native English speakers. I studied Spanish for many years and never came close to your level of proficiency and artistry in a second language. Hats off to you!
I don’t know any French, by the way, so I looked up: La mère fait du tricot. Le fils fait la guerre. The mother knits. The boy wages war. Nowadays in America, that statement might be viewed as reinforcing gender stereotypes, but I’m glad in France, when you were 15, language did not have to be policed so tightly. (I did not translate the whole poem, but I may do this soon.). An almost trivial note: I had to look up A4. We in America don’t use this size paper, or at least it’s not standard in our schools. Finally, I’d just say: you speak personal truths in such evocatively descriptive terms. Please keep writing. Your essays are a pleasure to read. And they always stimulate new thoughts and widen my circle of empathy.
I love how you brilliantly compared the school system to lottery. Learning is a process you can actually go through on your own. School can only force you to prove what the school wants you to learn😂. This is a great writeup Tsunimee ❤️
This is such a relevant and really though provoking article. I appreciate your candidness in talking about your own experiences, and thank you for that. I'm happy you're writing yourself because how you write is amazing and is a testament to how intelligent of a person you are. Because you write brilliantly.
I still carry a lot from this wrong relationship, and it's hard to move on from it. The comparisons of siblings past weighing you down, followed by the expectations of others and yourself. The wounds from the bullying by peers and it can be hard. Sometimes we need to find our callings in life, and albeit I'm still finding mine, I hope that writing will be one of many for you. Thank you again for writing such a beautiful article
There was a funny time when someone copied my answers on a quiz and got a C and was mad because they thought I was smart. I am. But not at school. I never knew what they wanted from me. I just kept pushing through enough so that I could have some autonomy if shit hit the fan. Glad I did. Thanks for sharing this piece.
This is such a beautiful (and non-cliched!) take on the disconnect between school and learning. And in reading that poem, it seems like the perfect metaphor for what you're describing ... a world devoid of curiosity that's all about the rinse-and-repeat of life. (How on earth did your intellectual friend get "ersatz" out of it!? I'm impressed!) And similarly, I was able to read that poem because, after years of textbook French studies where I became a pro at telling you Sandrine voulait aller aux Champs-Élysées hier and other practical statements, I finally picked up some reading books in college and started to really get to know the language (although NO WHERE NEAR as well as you and English.)
Thought-provoking piece! For several years I was on the track to enter a PhD program. Higher education is a bizarre world in many ways.
I love school and could be a student the rest of my life. But the posturing and insecurity is exhausting. It rewards the ability to write academic papers. The actual content can be unremarkable as long as the format holds. I wonder how much AI will make that skill obsolete.
Lots to explore here! Thanks for writing and sharing.
Your curiosity will take you places the lessons in school were never designed to. And so many people who easily navigate the world of school will never have your spark.
People want to box us up and define us because categorizing is easier than understanding. You are doing the right thing. The harder thing.
Tsu, the proof-vs-learning distinction is chef's kiss. Truly.
The startup I tried to build was around exactly that gap: not access, specifically --- the failure you're describing happens in expensive schools too. It's methodological; the system was never designed to measure whether something sparked. Only whether you could produce evidence that it had, under timed conditions, from memory, on demand.
& the lottery metaphor is the most honest thing I've read about revision. We called it studying. It was gambling. & the walk of shame when you'd picked wrong wasn't evidence of laziness. Rather, it was evidence of a system that mistook a blank page for a verdict.
Growing up near the economic bottom in the philippines, the reverence for education was real. But tbh I'm not sure it solved the problem. It might have just made the stakes of the lottery higher.
Thank you so much for reacting so deeply with this post. I remember reading about your start up actually. What a moving piece it was. Reflecting on education makes me so upset. Everytime I try to rant about it with people outside Substack, they say "but you need money for that, you can't overhaul the education system like that, it needs to be approved, it would take for ever etc.. ". So what's the solution then? Keeping it the same forever because it's too much hassle to change? Treating teachers like glorified baby sitters while the parents go to work? These are the most formative years of a human being, they can only live that period of their life once and this is the care they give to it. It's not good enough xx
100% on your point about the resistance to changing it; unfortunately the people who can, are already way too comfortable to bother most of the time & they often conveniently have their children in *good schools or done with school 🫠
This is still so relevant. As someone who works in a school I often feel like all we’re doing is keeping these kids alive in between drop off and home time and. Most of the things they’re learning will be so irrelevant to them. We’re just keeping them for 6 hours so their parents don’t go insane/can earn a wage.
Dear Tsunimee,
I feel so honored that you recommended one of my essays to your readers. Thank you. It brought joy to me to know that the piece resonated soundly for you—and that you thought it might speak to others, too.
More important is what you wrote about the sad mismatch between the culture of your schooling and the summons of your soul. I know you were careful to say that you did not feel as a student like a member of an oppressed class, but it seems to me that, while not ideological or malicious, the school system walked right past the essential you, and didn’t seem to care. You describe this so well. I felt not only sad but also angry because this is not how schooling needs to be done! You may not have been a victim in any sort of brutal way. But I think your spirit was a victim. And for this, I offer my solace and my compassion.
Also, I have immense admiration for your bilingualism. I don’t know how you managed to become much more fluent and graceful in your English than the vast majority of native English speakers. I studied Spanish for many years and never came close to your level of proficiency and artistry in a second language. Hats off to you!
I don’t know any French, by the way, so I looked up: La mère fait du tricot. Le fils fait la guerre. The mother knits. The boy wages war. Nowadays in America, that statement might be viewed as reinforcing gender stereotypes, but I’m glad in France, when you were 15, language did not have to be policed so tightly. (I did not translate the whole poem, but I may do this soon.). An almost trivial note: I had to look up A4. We in America don’t use this size paper, or at least it’s not standard in our schools. Finally, I’d just say: you speak personal truths in such evocatively descriptive terms. Please keep writing. Your essays are a pleasure to read. And they always stimulate new thoughts and widen my circle of empathy.
I love how you brilliantly compared the school system to lottery. Learning is a process you can actually go through on your own. School can only force you to prove what the school wants you to learn😂. This is a great writeup Tsunimee ❤️
This is such a relevant and really though provoking article. I appreciate your candidness in talking about your own experiences, and thank you for that. I'm happy you're writing yourself because how you write is amazing and is a testament to how intelligent of a person you are. Because you write brilliantly.
I still carry a lot from this wrong relationship, and it's hard to move on from it. The comparisons of siblings past weighing you down, followed by the expectations of others and yourself. The wounds from the bullying by peers and it can be hard. Sometimes we need to find our callings in life, and albeit I'm still finding mine, I hope that writing will be one of many for you. Thank you again for writing such a beautiful article
There was a funny time when someone copied my answers on a quiz and got a C and was mad because they thought I was smart. I am. But not at school. I never knew what they wanted from me. I just kept pushing through enough so that I could have some autonomy if shit hit the fan. Glad I did. Thanks for sharing this piece.
This is such a beautiful (and non-cliched!) take on the disconnect between school and learning. And in reading that poem, it seems like the perfect metaphor for what you're describing ... a world devoid of curiosity that's all about the rinse-and-repeat of life. (How on earth did your intellectual friend get "ersatz" out of it!? I'm impressed!) And similarly, I was able to read that poem because, after years of textbook French studies where I became a pro at telling you Sandrine voulait aller aux Champs-Élysées hier and other practical statements, I finally picked up some reading books in college and started to really get to know the language (although NO WHERE NEAR as well as you and English.)
Another excellent piece. I suspect it resonates with many of us whether we successfully played the school game or not.
Thought-provoking piece! For several years I was on the track to enter a PhD program. Higher education is a bizarre world in many ways.
I love school and could be a student the rest of my life. But the posturing and insecurity is exhausting. It rewards the ability to write academic papers. The actual content can be unremarkable as long as the format holds. I wonder how much AI will make that skill obsolete.
Lots to explore here! Thanks for writing and sharing.
Yes to everything. God like you I'm genuinely stumped on reflection how curiosity survived formal education. It feels like it shouldn't
Your curiosity will take you places the lessons in school were never designed to. And so many people who easily navigate the world of school will never have your spark.
People want to box us up and define us because categorizing is easier than understanding. You are doing the right thing. The harder thing.
Decades after the Prévert poem, after the ersatz dissertation, after the walk of shame, I am writing essays. Voluntarily. For no grade.
Love that! I hadn't thought of it that way. That I am now doing for fun what was so hard for so long.