School

Capitalism has ruined many things, including school. While I was relatively competitive throughout high school, it was only to get into my college of choice. After making it through that hoop, there’s not a clear next step after college. A job, yes, and it should be relevant to your major and beneficial to your career, but how do you even go about that? Right now I participate in a couple of different honor societies and I have to keep my GPA above 3.3. It provides a mixed feeling of motivation, fear, and pressure, but also increases my likelihood of success. The reason for my worries comes from a type of external force complex, where I feel as if all of my work as a successful student doesn’t say anything about my academic successes. Throughout school, I tended to be one of the teacher’s favorites, not necessarily for speaking up or any form of charisma, but because I usually just stayed quiet and did my work. I never felt like I was working super hard on any given assignment, I got overwhelmed a few times but I always did fine, and that worked to my detriment. Because I never felt like I was accomplishing something, let alone accomplishing something important, I never really felt like I earned my good grades. Rather, teachers only gave me a good grades because they liked me. Does that make sense?

Another thing to come from this complex is that when I’m unsuccessful, it also feels external. I didn’t receive any financial aid that I applied for* during my senior year of high school. For a while after that, I just felt so inferior and unlikable because of it, like who was I if I didn’t have academic validation? Who judged my applications anyways, and why did they hate me? I used to think that way because of this complex, feeling like I didn’t need to try that hard. I didn’t put much effort into those essays, not as much as I should’ve, and I used to be pretty awful at writing about myself or my experiences, thus leading to the lack of funding.

I don’t think I’m completely wrong for my former conclusions, though. Schools in the United States aren’t focused on learning, they’re businesses within a harshly competitive capitalist society. In my state, and I’m assuming this is the case for others, public schools would have annual tests at each grade level over core class subjects (math, social studies, language arts, and science). The schools with the highest scores would receive more funding, and the schools that performed worse would receive very minimal funding. Do you already see what’s wrong here? Schools that are initially underfunded can’t provide the same quality of education as well-funded schools, thus they get worse test scores and are perpetually underfunded because of it. When reading This City is Killing Me by Jonathan Foiles, I hadn’t even known that there were public high schools that students would have to compete to get into. It didn’t even register with me that this would be a thing in the states, as I assumed most public schools were relatively similar to mine; underfunded and chaotic. To me, going to private school seemed like your only shot at a better education, and even then it wouldn’t guarantee much at a high school level.

Honestly, I still feel slight pangs of jealousy when I think about the opportunities afforded to my former dorm-mates just for the sake of going to slightly wealthier public schools in different parts of the states. One of their schools even had an internship network, and there were interesting extracurriculars that they could take to explore major and career options. My school had things like home economics and an outdated C++ class you could take, but not much past that. Even the band program I was a part of is slowly falling apart at the seams due to continual budget cuts each year. Of course, it’s not the fault of these former dorm-mates that they were born in a different part of the country with different values, not at all, I’m more upset nowadays at the systems that let these inequities affect young people. I’m upset that I haven’t been able to understand and express these frustrations until being radicalized last year with the still mismanaged covid crisis, breadtube, and a college course on feminism. I used to only think about solving problems within capitalism, but of course that won't lead to satisfying answers.

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*I still receive financial help from my university as well as through a government grant, but I didn’t apply for either.