By: Robert Hunter
The bus pulled up to a sand-colored, windowless, brick building, and I stepped off on to the cold cement. A large, brown canopy covered the sidewalk that went parallel to the side of the building, but could provide no protection against the cold wind that blew across the blue-grey tarmac. I rushed through the black double doors and found myself staring at a long corridor that stretched over 400 feet in front of me. The interior walls were made of the same bland, sand-colored bricks as the exterior with three stripes of grey-brown bricks that ran the entire length of the hall on either side. Surprisingly, this was a school. It really looked like a prison, or some containment facility, but in fact, it was a school. To an extent it was a prison or a containment facility, designed to contain uninterested students and force feed them information until their heads ached and they were half asleep from long hours of memorization. After all, that’s what school is nowadays. Occasionally there was an interesting project or two but nonetheless, school had turned in to a place of constant mental torture and regulation. Perhaps the regulation was the worst because it was administered by the staff. The staff were the highest ranking officials in the building and even higher, were the administrators. The administrators were people you didn’t come in to contact with on a daily basis and had an immense amount of power. With the click of a button, they could have your personal records scarred for life. The lower staff included the teachers, except nowadays, teachers didn’t teach. Instead, they administered worksheets to be completed in 50 minute blocks of time, and if you didn’t finish within that time, they would award you with a failing grade on that sheet. Every few weeks they would give everyone a test on those sheets that examined our ability to memorize information and regurgitate it out again. This was the new way of teaching. It was something about training students to teach themselves or be independent, things of that sorts. Nevertheless, it was a cruel system and had many downsides to it. At this point, I snapped back to reality. I was near the end of the long corridor which emptied out in to the gym lobby. There was a concession stand to the right, but it had never been used as far as I could remember. On the left was the massive, circular gym which rose up three stories and was capped with a stout dome, not more than ten feet high but with a diameter of over 150 feet. It was shielded with the same sand colored, and grey-brown colored bricks and even in the same fashion. There were three halls that deviated from this part: the D, E, and F halls, but I did not need to go down any of them. Instead, I continued through the lobby and walked back outside. It was an overcast day, although oblivious to the inhabitants of the building. In the distance, there was a forest of pine trees that stood in the cold wind like noble men on a battlefront. From here, there were the G and H halls. I quickly ran to the doors of the G hall, opened them, and slipped inside. The hall had a sweet, sickly smell with a hint of white board marker residue, and blue lockers lined the edges of the hall at random intervals. I walked through the second door on the left and found myself in math class. For the first 50 minutes of the day, I would sit in a desk, composed of a plastic chair and a hard, cardboard tabletop, solving numerous quadratic functions. As the time neared 8:20, students started pouring in. Many were loud and obnoxious, but some were diligent beings that prided themselves with high marks and perfect attendance records. At about 8:14, a computer generated bell sound rang four times over the intercom system throughout the building signaling that there was roughly six minutes until the school day started. The entire time, the teacher sat behind a metal desk preparing a load of worksheets worth about one small tree. The classroom itself had a gloomy atmosphere, despite the pure white, cinderblock walls and the bright fluorescent lights that rained down. Perhaps it was the absence of windows which were omitted from the design because windows were not needed for a successful education. In fact, the architects feared that windows would distract students from completing assignments. At 8:19, the same bell sounded except this time, in three short blasts which signaled that there was one minute until school officially started. Perhaps this atmosphere was designed, meticulously crafted, to make the student body feel suppressed by the intimidating staff members. At 8:20, the final bell rang and the students took their respective seats while the teacher began to pass out the worksheets. I looked down at the sheet. The top section explained the process to factor a quadratic in to two separate parts. It seemed easy, but the questions at the bottom of the page and on the back were rigged with hidden numerical traps. With this in mind, I set off to work. I was just finishing off the second problem when I gave up interest. What was the point of solving all these problems? What purpose would they serve in life? I looked around the room. Everywhere, students of all shapes, sizes, and races were hunched over their sheets vigorously working away. There was the constant tapping sound of pencil on paper, and the occasional hushed whisper, the bright fluorescent lights that radiated from the ceiling, the bland, white walls, the constant regulation, the gloomy atmosphere, the list went on and on. At this point, it was unbearable. Surely there was some better way, some better form, of education. Maybe it didn’t have to be like this. Maybe everyone could work in groups where creativity prospered and ideas roamed free. Maybe, but how would I know? How would anyone know? The only life we’ve known is in the schoolyard. At this time, I had unconsciously wasted nearly thirty-five minutes of the class period. I set back to work, but my mind kept on wandering to those thoughts again. It never occurred to me until this point, that a standard bachelor's degree in computer science would be rendered virtually worthless by educational inflation in about twenty years. There had to be something I could do. The time was 9:05. I had to work quickly if I was going to be able to salvage any grade out of this sheet in front of me. Class would end in five minutes. I had to hurry. I was just getting to the back when the computer generated bell sound rang across the campus, shouting in to every crack and crevice of the room. I dreadfully picked up my sheet and lined up with everyone else to turn it in to the teacher. Why couldn’t I have worked faster? Why did I have to be so distracted all the time? If I couldn’t even finish one sheet in 50 minutes, what would I amount to in my life? Would I amount to anything? No wonder the student body was considered the lowest social class in the school. It’s because of people like me. Maybe it was ADHD. Nowadays, hardly anyone didn’t have it. If you had six problems left at the end of the period, you probably had it. If you were restless at some points, you had it. If you thought deeply about something and couldn’t get your mind off it even though you could function perfectly well, you had it. Nowadays, it was used by doctors as a way of explaining every reason that a student did not do well in school. I snapped back to reality just as I handed my sheet to the teacher.
“Why didn’t you finish this?” The teacher asked sternly.
“I-” She cut me off.
“This is the fifth time you didn’t even finish half of this sheet. I need to see you after everyone else leaves.” The teacher demanded. I solemnly walked to the side and waited until everyone else had turned in their sheets. I saw that nearly everyone had finished all the questions and most had the same answers. These fine people would graduate from school with flying colors, speed through college, and land a stable job in an ordinary office building, with ordinary cubicles, wear ordinary attire, working on ordinary computer code, and live an ordinary life, with ordinary kids, that would live up to their parents’ ordinary expectations. And then there would be me: a lonely man that can’t even finish one worksheet because his mind wanders too much to amount to anything in life. Ordinary was good, wasn’t it? It meant normal.
“Come.” The teacher motioned me. She led me through the halls and we ended up in a room on the science hall, also known as the H hall. It was a standard room, except the walls were painted blue and there was a window on the far wall. A window. I didn’t even know those existed in the classroom block of the building. There were vending machines along one end of the room that sold soda and candy, and there were wooden tables arranged in a rectangular pattern in the center. This was obviously the teachers lounge.
“You can sit down right there.” The teacher said as she pointed to a plastic chair with a metal backbone. She took out a stack of papers from a filing cabinet in the corner and sat down in one of the many fabric coated chairs arranged at the tables.
“So I don’t know what is happening, but you aren’t doing your work.” She said sternly. “This is a school of excellence, you know. Here, we pride ourselves with having the best academic records in the county, and having you here would be a disgrace… if you were to continue to not put in effort like how you have been doing. The things you are learning are not hard. I don’t understand how someone could just not do it. The teachers at this school take their jobs very seriously, especially me. If we see that one student is not putting effort, or constantly misbehaving, you know what we do? We get rid of them, but only if they clearly show us that they will refuse to change their ways. It’s a matter of keeping our academic records pure. Kids like you obviously don’t understand how hard it is to be a teacher. You have to be focused and present all the time, because it takes that kind of concentration to pick out misbehaving kids.” At that moment, another teacher, a male teacher with blond hair that probably worked in the science department, came in to the room and whispered something in to her ear.
“Alright, I have to go deal with another situation for a few minutes. If you move from that seat, you will be seeing the administrators.” She said. And with that, the two of them walked out of the room. I could hear the tapping of their shoes on the floor tiles as it faded away. The teachers seemed to get treated much better than the students. The lounge had a brighter atmosphere, and better food. It even had a pool table in the corner, although it didn’t look like it had been used in a very long time. I looked out the window and saw the same forest of pine trees I had seen earlier in the day except the sun was beginning to peek out of the clouds and it casted brilliant shadows on them. I looked at it for a few minutes, enchanted by the pure beauty of the sky and how boundless it really was. It was a shame that the students could not see it for most of the day for it was a magnificent sight to behold. It just wasn’t right that students had to spend long hours doing boring work when they could be experiencing life to its fullest potential. Maybe the administrators would understand. Yes, the administrators had to agree on the fact that this education system was immoral and that simple creativity was necessary for developing minds. The teacher did say that I would be seeing the administrators if I moved from my seat, so I got up and walked over to the vending machine because I had a bit of money I could spend. I was weighing my options when the teacher came back in to the room. When she had left, her hair had been tied back in a tight bun, but now it was flowing free down her shoulders. Perhaps she was even blushing, smiling a bit, but it quickly faded when she saw that I had got up from my seat.
“Ok, I see. You obviously don’t have an ounce of respect for people who are superior to you.” She began. “I’ll be walking you down to the principal’s office.” As we went down the hall, she fixed her hair up again and then led me through the gym lobby to the same hall with the sand-colored bricks. The principal was the highest ranking administrator and had jurisdiction over everything. The administrators themselves oversaw all key functions of the school, including the teachers. They evaluated their performance and decided what subjects they would be teaching, and to which students. The administrators were also in charge of making sure that the school was keeping up with other schools in the nation. In the middle of the main hall, there was the entrance, which was build nearly twenty-five years ago and situated right next to the administrative offices. The entrance was a grand structure with curtains of glass windows on all sides. It was softly lighted by six lanterns that hung from the underside of the curved roof which was mounted on ten massive stone pillars. It never failed to impress me each time I walked past it. The teacher led me to the front office, which was right next to the entrance, and led me through the offices behind until we got to the principal’s office. The principal was not there at the moment, so she had me sit down in a chair in front of a great oak desk while she went off to find him. From the way the office was furnished, it was easy to tell that administrators were treated very nicely. The office had a carpet floor and paintings that depicted various historical scenes on the walls. The chairs were made of heavy oak wood and there was even a small library in the corner. On the exterior wall, there was a window that was about four times as large as the one in the teacher’s lounge. Outside, I could see the skeletons of trees in the cold winter air as the sun painted beautiful shadows of them on the cement. I was observing the natural world when the principal arrived, and sat down in the chair behind his desk. I was expecting him to say something straight away, but instead, he took to his computer and started typing something.
“Do you realize what you have done wrong?” He finally asked.
“Sort of.” I replied.
“Why are you not putting effort in to your schoolwork? This is your future that you are creating right here. If you slack off now, you will not live a well sustained life. I also hear that you have been disrespecting the teacher.”
“Well, lately I have been thinking.” I said with the hope of him realizing the flaws in the education system. “The way we are teaching students now is not how it should be. Instead of regulating our activities to the point of manipulation, we should embrace the creativity inside of everyone.” I did not know what else to say, nor did I know what he would think of this. Honestly, this man had so much power that he could either have me sent to prison for suggesting such things, or have me put on every newspaper in the world for fixing the education system. My muscles tensed and I could feel the sweat in my palms. His eyebrows twitched, suggesting approval, or dismay. There was a long pause, perhaps even as long as a full minute. Then, he began to speak.
The End
The bus pulled up to a sand-colored, windowless, brick building, and I stepped off on to the cold cement. A large, brown canopy covered the sidewalk that went parallel to the side of the building, but could provide no protection against the cold wind that blew across the blue-grey tarmac. I rushed through the black double doors and found myself staring at a long corridor that stretched over 400 feet in front of me. The interior walls were made of the same bland, sand-colored bricks as the exterior with three stripes of grey-brown bricks that ran the entire length of the hall on either side. Surprisingly, this was a school. It really looked like a prison, or some containment facility, but in fact, it was a school. To an extent it was a prison or a containment facility, designed to contain uninterested students and force feed them information until their heads ached and they were half asleep from long hours of memorization. After all, that’s what school is nowadays. Occasionally there was an interesting project or two but nonetheless, school had turned in to a place of constant mental torture and regulation. Perhaps the regulation was the worst because it was administered by the staff. The staff were the highest ranking officials in the building and even higher, were the administrators. The administrators were people you didn’t come in to contact with on a daily basis and had an immense amount of power. With the click of a button, they could have your personal records scarred for life. The lower staff included the teachers, except nowadays, teachers didn’t teach. Instead, they administered worksheets to be completed in 50 minute blocks of time, and if you didn’t finish within that time, they would award you with a failing grade on that sheet. Every few weeks they would give everyone a test on those sheets that examined our ability to memorize information and regurgitate it out again. This was the new way of teaching. It was something about training students to teach themselves or be independent, things of that sorts. Nevertheless, it was a cruel system and had many downsides to it. At this point, I snapped back to reality. I was near the end of the long corridor which emptied out in to the gym lobby. There was a concession stand to the right, but it had never been used as far as I could remember. On the left was the massive, circular gym which rose up three stories and was capped with a stout dome, not more than ten feet high but with a diameter of over 150 feet. It was shielded with the same sand colored, and grey-brown colored bricks and even in the same fashion. There were three halls that deviated from this part: the D, E, and F halls, but I did not need to go down any of them. Instead, I continued through the lobby and walked back outside. It was an overcast day, although oblivious to the inhabitants of the building. In the distance, there was a forest of pine trees that stood in the cold wind like noble men on a battlefront. From here, there were the G and H halls. I quickly ran to the doors of the G hall, opened them, and slipped inside. The hall had a sweet, sickly smell with a hint of white board marker residue, and blue lockers lined the edges of the hall at random intervals. I walked through the second door on the left and found myself in math class. For the first 50 minutes of the day, I would sit in a desk, composed of a plastic chair and a hard, cardboard tabletop, solving numerous quadratic functions. As the time neared 8:20, students started pouring in. Many were loud and obnoxious, but some were diligent beings that prided themselves with high marks and perfect attendance records. At about 8:14, a computer generated bell sound rang four times over the intercom system throughout the building signaling that there was roughly six minutes until the school day started. The entire time, the teacher sat behind a metal desk preparing a load of worksheets worth about one small tree. The classroom itself had a gloomy atmosphere, despite the pure white, cinderblock walls and the bright fluorescent lights that rained down. Perhaps it was the absence of windows which were omitted from the design because windows were not needed for a successful education. In fact, the architects feared that windows would distract students from completing assignments. At 8:19, the same bell sounded except this time, in three short blasts which signaled that there was one minute until school officially started. Perhaps this atmosphere was designed, meticulously crafted, to make the student body feel suppressed by the intimidating staff members. At 8:20, the final bell rang and the students took their respective seats while the teacher began to pass out the worksheets. I looked down at the sheet. The top section explained the process to factor a quadratic in to two separate parts. It seemed easy, but the questions at the bottom of the page and on the back were rigged with hidden numerical traps. With this in mind, I set off to work. I was just finishing off the second problem when I gave up interest. What was the point of solving all these problems? What purpose would they serve in life? I looked around the room. Everywhere, students of all shapes, sizes, and races were hunched over their sheets vigorously working away. There was the constant tapping sound of pencil on paper, and the occasional hushed whisper, the bright fluorescent lights that radiated from the ceiling, the bland, white walls, the constant regulation, the gloomy atmosphere, the list went on and on. At this point, it was unbearable. Surely there was some better way, some better form, of education. Maybe it didn’t have to be like this. Maybe everyone could work in groups where creativity prospered and ideas roamed free. Maybe, but how would I know? How would anyone know? The only life we’ve known is in the schoolyard. At this time, I had unconsciously wasted nearly thirty-five minutes of the class period. I set back to work, but my mind kept on wandering to those thoughts again. It never occurred to me until this point, that a standard bachelor's degree in computer science would be rendered virtually worthless by educational inflation in about twenty years. There had to be something I could do. The time was 9:05. I had to work quickly if I was going to be able to salvage any grade out of this sheet in front of me. Class would end in five minutes. I had to hurry. I was just getting to the back when the computer generated bell sound rang across the campus, shouting in to every crack and crevice of the room. I dreadfully picked up my sheet and lined up with everyone else to turn it in to the teacher. Why couldn’t I have worked faster? Why did I have to be so distracted all the time? If I couldn’t even finish one sheet in 50 minutes, what would I amount to in my life? Would I amount to anything? No wonder the student body was considered the lowest social class in the school. It’s because of people like me. Maybe it was ADHD. Nowadays, hardly anyone didn’t have it. If you had six problems left at the end of the period, you probably had it. If you were restless at some points, you had it. If you thought deeply about something and couldn’t get your mind off it even though you could function perfectly well, you had it. Nowadays, it was used by doctors as a way of explaining every reason that a student did not do well in school. I snapped back to reality just as I handed my sheet to the teacher.
“Why didn’t you finish this?” The teacher asked sternly.
“I-” She cut me off.
“This is the fifth time you didn’t even finish half of this sheet. I need to see you after everyone else leaves.” The teacher demanded. I solemnly walked to the side and waited until everyone else had turned in their sheets. I saw that nearly everyone had finished all the questions and most had the same answers. These fine people would graduate from school with flying colors, speed through college, and land a stable job in an ordinary office building, with ordinary cubicles, wear ordinary attire, working on ordinary computer code, and live an ordinary life, with ordinary kids, that would live up to their parents’ ordinary expectations. And then there would be me: a lonely man that can’t even finish one worksheet because his mind wanders too much to amount to anything in life. Ordinary was good, wasn’t it? It meant normal.
“Come.” The teacher motioned me. She led me through the halls and we ended up in a room on the science hall, also known as the H hall. It was a standard room, except the walls were painted blue and there was a window on the far wall. A window. I didn’t even know those existed in the classroom block of the building. There were vending machines along one end of the room that sold soda and candy, and there were wooden tables arranged in a rectangular pattern in the center. This was obviously the teachers lounge.
“You can sit down right there.” The teacher said as she pointed to a plastic chair with a metal backbone. She took out a stack of papers from a filing cabinet in the corner and sat down in one of the many fabric coated chairs arranged at the tables.
“So I don’t know what is happening, but you aren’t doing your work.” She said sternly. “This is a school of excellence, you know. Here, we pride ourselves with having the best academic records in the county, and having you here would be a disgrace… if you were to continue to not put in effort like how you have been doing. The things you are learning are not hard. I don’t understand how someone could just not do it. The teachers at this school take their jobs very seriously, especially me. If we see that one student is not putting effort, or constantly misbehaving, you know what we do? We get rid of them, but only if they clearly show us that they will refuse to change their ways. It’s a matter of keeping our academic records pure. Kids like you obviously don’t understand how hard it is to be a teacher. You have to be focused and present all the time, because it takes that kind of concentration to pick out misbehaving kids.” At that moment, another teacher, a male teacher with blond hair that probably worked in the science department, came in to the room and whispered something in to her ear.
“Alright, I have to go deal with another situation for a few minutes. If you move from that seat, you will be seeing the administrators.” She said. And with that, the two of them walked out of the room. I could hear the tapping of their shoes on the floor tiles as it faded away. The teachers seemed to get treated much better than the students. The lounge had a brighter atmosphere, and better food. It even had a pool table in the corner, although it didn’t look like it had been used in a very long time. I looked out the window and saw the same forest of pine trees I had seen earlier in the day except the sun was beginning to peek out of the clouds and it casted brilliant shadows on them. I looked at it for a few minutes, enchanted by the pure beauty of the sky and how boundless it really was. It was a shame that the students could not see it for most of the day for it was a magnificent sight to behold. It just wasn’t right that students had to spend long hours doing boring work when they could be experiencing life to its fullest potential. Maybe the administrators would understand. Yes, the administrators had to agree on the fact that this education system was immoral and that simple creativity was necessary for developing minds. The teacher did say that I would be seeing the administrators if I moved from my seat, so I got up and walked over to the vending machine because I had a bit of money I could spend. I was weighing my options when the teacher came back in to the room. When she had left, her hair had been tied back in a tight bun, but now it was flowing free down her shoulders. Perhaps she was even blushing, smiling a bit, but it quickly faded when she saw that I had got up from my seat.
“Ok, I see. You obviously don’t have an ounce of respect for people who are superior to you.” She began. “I’ll be walking you down to the principal’s office.” As we went down the hall, she fixed her hair up again and then led me through the gym lobby to the same hall with the sand-colored bricks. The principal was the highest ranking administrator and had jurisdiction over everything. The administrators themselves oversaw all key functions of the school, including the teachers. They evaluated their performance and decided what subjects they would be teaching, and to which students. The administrators were also in charge of making sure that the school was keeping up with other schools in the nation. In the middle of the main hall, there was the entrance, which was build nearly twenty-five years ago and situated right next to the administrative offices. The entrance was a grand structure with curtains of glass windows on all sides. It was softly lighted by six lanterns that hung from the underside of the curved roof which was mounted on ten massive stone pillars. It never failed to impress me each time I walked past it. The teacher led me to the front office, which was right next to the entrance, and led me through the offices behind until we got to the principal’s office. The principal was not there at the moment, so she had me sit down in a chair in front of a great oak desk while she went off to find him. From the way the office was furnished, it was easy to tell that administrators were treated very nicely. The office had a carpet floor and paintings that depicted various historical scenes on the walls. The chairs were made of heavy oak wood and there was even a small library in the corner. On the exterior wall, there was a window that was about four times as large as the one in the teacher’s lounge. Outside, I could see the skeletons of trees in the cold winter air as the sun painted beautiful shadows of them on the cement. I was observing the natural world when the principal arrived, and sat down in the chair behind his desk. I was expecting him to say something straight away, but instead, he took to his computer and started typing something.
“Do you realize what you have done wrong?” He finally asked.
“Sort of.” I replied.
“Why are you not putting effort in to your schoolwork? This is your future that you are creating right here. If you slack off now, you will not live a well sustained life. I also hear that you have been disrespecting the teacher.”
“Well, lately I have been thinking.” I said with the hope of him realizing the flaws in the education system. “The way we are teaching students now is not how it should be. Instead of regulating our activities to the point of manipulation, we should embrace the creativity inside of everyone.” I did not know what else to say, nor did I know what he would think of this. Honestly, this man had so much power that he could either have me sent to prison for suggesting such things, or have me put on every newspaper in the world for fixing the education system. My muscles tensed and I could feel the sweat in my palms. His eyebrows twitched, suggesting approval, or dismay. There was a long pause, perhaps even as long as a full minute. Then, he began to speak.
The End