Let’s start with an indisputable truth. Public education — at least in the US, I can’t speak for other countries — is bad. A public school is a bad place; it’s a cesspool. The whole idea of compulsory public education is just a terrible concept, a failed experiment, and needs to be overhauled or abolished, and that’s a fact, but that’s a rant for another day.
Myself, I had the misfortune of attending public school all thirteen formative years, K thru 12, and those thirteen years messed me up in irreparable ways. That’s what public school does: it messes kids up. It robs them of their precious innocence far too early.
I remember as early as fourth grade — maybe even sooner, but that was just when I started to become aware of it — all of my classmates seemed to be in a hurry to become teenagers. Kids of eight, nine, and ten listening to the risqué pop and hip-hop on Hot 101.9 and adopting the lingo. Little boys and girls pretending to “go out” with each other. “Where are they ‘going out’?!” I used to ask. “It’s not like they can drive! Why do they think they’re teenagers?!” And all the girls in a hurry to be wearing a bra, and letting everyone know that they were wearing a bra, because, ahem, see, they needed one, and all the boys in a hurry to be snapping all the straps of all these new bras.
Even back then, I was like: what is the hurry? Why are all my peers in such a rush to grow up?
I guess you could say it’s the parents’ fault, not the school’s. If the kids weren’t exposed to mature stuff at home, then they wouldn’t bring it to school, right? Not necessarily. Kids are sponges. They just pick up on stuff. And then they share it. I remember exactly where I was when I learned what a middle finger meant: in my kindergarten classroom, coloring with markers at the table with my little friend. Kids absorb stuff and then, if they’re in school, they go and share it with all the other kids. Like a virus. If not for the filthy swampy hotbed environment that is public school, the sour information a kid picks up wouldn’t spread around all excitedly and multiply the way that it does. School is the problem.
Besides: I don’t like to blame parents (unless they truly did something heinous and unforgivable). Parents already get enough blame as it is.
Even more now than they were back in the late ’90s, kids are losing their innocence too early.
.
“Well Mith, maybe you’re just slow. Maybe you’re just childish.” Maybe you’re right. I guess by the current standards I was what they call a “late bloomer,” although I’m pretty sure that for human females it’s actually normal to not menstruate until 13. (As for the “needing a bra” milestone, I can’t really speak on that, as I still don’t really need one now, in my mid-thirties; #IBTC for life.) These days many kids are overweight, which is lowering the age of the onset of puberty. And media is trashier, more explicit, and more readily-available than ever, which if I had to guess is probably lowering the age of “psychological” puberty as well.
Psychologically, as well, I was a “late bloomer.” Academically, I was ahead of the curve, but when it came to fitting in socially, being aware of mature things, and doing things the other kids were doing, I lagged behind. Sure I had crushes all throughout my elementary days, but they were all very childlike, playful, innocent. A boy had nice hair the color of semisweet chocolate, and/or he was smart and funny or could draw really well, and so I was fascinated by him, stared at him across the classroom, thought about him and his nice hair while listening to “U Drive Me Crazy” by Britney Spears on my older sister’s walkman, and that was that.
I was always secretive about these crushes, not understanding why the popular kids kept talking about their crushes during recess like it was hot gossip, why they kept sharing this information with each other, with devious smiles and this weird sort of pride, that they “liked” so-and-so; wasn’t that an embarrassingly vulnerable thing to share? That you felt mushy inside about someone and pictured them in your head while listening to Britney Spears? Why did they think this was such a cool thing to talk about? I’m not trying to say that I was wiser or anything, I was just incredibly naïve. I didn’t know anything about anything. I didn’t get it: and I still don’t: why did people want to grow up?
It wasn’t until eighth grade, age 13-14, when I had my first actual mature crush, the kind that makes you go: oh!, okay, I get it now, why people desire physical contact with other people. (Predictably, this crush was on a rather plain-looking boy, a good six inches shorter than me, named Tyler; all American millennial girls really had the same life, didn’t we?) But even then, it was childlike. There was nothing really adult about it. My BFF and I had a code name for him and would draw little cartoons of him in our notebooks. We actually had this stupid game where, whenever we saw a cute guy walking down the hall, we looked at each other and softly went: wee-oo, wee-oo, sounding the hottie alarm. We were dorks. Being misfits who didn’t really participate in the social scene, we were relatively sheltered from what was hot and trendy. We were nothing like the thirteen-year-olds you see on TV these days, who are so fashionable and sleek and aware and over-sexualized. Who barely had time to just be kids. It’s not their fault.
I blame public schools.
.
Why the hurry to grow up? Maybe I’m just a loser who peaked in fifth grade. I’m not beating those allegations. Fifth grade was my best year. It felt like I knew who I was then; it wasn’t that complicated. 2000-2001; I had just turned ten. I had three close friends — we called ourselves the Diamonds. That was the last time I really had a “friend group,” per se. We laughed and had fun and had sleepovers. We had innocent crushes and innocent drama. Cute boys and toy horse collections. Those clear backpacks from Old Navy. CDs and Lunchables and computer games after school in the family’s computer room. Chips by the pool, with no thought whatsoever of diet or exercise. It all felt very important. It was like living in a middle grade novel.
I liked that year, and was in no particular hurry to switch from my familiar elementary school to the scary, unfamiliar middle school, where I’d have six or seven teachers instead of just one, and I’d have to memorize my class schedule and my way around the building, and the combination to a locker where I’d have to store my stuff. The only thing I looked forward to about middle school was the playground. The place had a really wicked playground outside, a big wooden structure they called The Hive (because the school’s mascot was the hornet), which had a big rope net for climbing and was just way cooler than the metal-and-plastic playground at my old school. That was the exciting part, for me.
I wasn’t ready for middle school. Heck, I still don’t feel ready for a place like that.
In elementary, all those mature themes like bodies and crushes were whispered-about, giggled-about, mentioned sneakily, rippling beneath the surface of the class like something latent, growing. But in middle school, it had all just burst open. It was a free-for-all. Kids that age know too much for their maturity level. Kids that age are animals. Maybe in isolation they’re lovely, but in large groups they’re heathens — they can’t help it, it’s a biological phase. But they shouldn’t be in large groups unsupervised like that. (Because one overworked, underpaid adult per twenty-plus adolescent savages does not count as “supervision.”) Public school is a recipe for disaster.
I did not do well with the transition. Even harder would be the transition from middle to high school, three years later — but middle school, that was where it started. Public elementary school made kids grow up too fast. Made them victims. Public middle school took those victims and pitted them against each other Roman gladiator-style, shamelessly. Public high school seals the deal, drying the cement on their damaged souls. If you had a great time in public school, I’m glad for you, but I also wonder if you’re doing okay, really. Imo homeschooling is not a luxury. Doesn’t matter how little money we have to live on. I’ll resort to begging on the street before I send my children to public school.
Because what is this hurry to grow up? I had such a hard time saying goodbye to my childhood. I fought tooth and nail to cling to it. The extreme dieting that began in middle school, in my case it wasn’t because of a mature desire to be slim and sexy; not in those early days. I think it really started as a desire to stay small, to avoid responsibility, to avoid the sheer horror of living in an adult female body. Please just keep taking care of me. Don’t make me do this, this ‘life’ thing. I didn’t understand the other kids’ rush to act like they were older than they were. We’re still so young, I wanted to shout at them. We’re still so young! What are you doing!
And I kept right on feeling like that all through high school, and through my twenties, no, I’m not an adult yet!, and now suddenly I am 36 and I feel like I missed a boat somewhere. A healthy sense of growing up, of being at the right stage at the right time, was never there. Childhood was just ripped away. I know it’s my own fault I’m a weirdo and I take full responsibility for my own shortcomings. However, I also blame public school.
I didn’t want to say goodbye to fifth grade. I remember at my fifth grade graduation our music teacher had us sing “Time Of Your Life” by Green Day. I remember the sweltering school gymnasium full of folding chairs and the teal-blue flowery dress I wore, without really worrying about what my body looked like in it. For years I’d wish I could get back that freedom, that degree of unself-consciousness. But it was already being pulled away. When I look back at the photos of that awkward girl with the poofy hair and her hands gripping that fifth grade diploma, I can see it slipping away, her innocence and freedom already being pulled away.
.
Sure kids will grow up, whether they go to public or private school or school at home. Sure they grow up too fast regardless. That’s a brutal fact of life. But we don’t have to make it worse. Innocence is a treasure. The powers that be ought to concern themselves with protecting and preserving it. But where’s the money in that, I guess. Yes, it’s partly just the tragedy of being human, but it’s also public school.
“But Mith, your kids are going to be so sheltered” — damn right they are! The world is a terrible place and I’m going to shelter them as hard as I can, to let their precious minds form and develop in a safe and nurturing environment, so that when they inevitably have to enter this terrible world, they do so with a healthier, less-damaged sense of themselves, and with a better perspective on the world, and with their purity.
