School Sucks
The rhymes that were spoken about in the T.R. Johnson article
reveal something rather interesting about fear, power, and the politics of both
in the school setting. Having attended
private schools until high school, I always thought of my elementary experience
as a sheltered one. My rebellions weren’t caused by not feeling heard, or valued, so
much as it was about expressing, and asserting
my burgeoning sense of self. This meant smoking in a convent storage room, at the age of
twelve. Not threatening others. What my forty-something self knows, that my
pre-teen self didn’t, is the idea that we all resist and push against the power
structure. For some of us, that work is taking place inwardly, and for others
the struggle takes a more sublime (in the Edmund Burke tradition) path.
However, both are about trying to map out one’s subjectivity. Sadly, I
really think that most people, not just kids, struggle with trying to figure
out where they fit in, in the hierarchy of not only school but life. It is that
fear that drives the kind of violence that these songs address. Ironically the
violence is directed at the very people that can help them overcome this lack.
Writing can help people not only find their voice, but to use it in a way that
affirms life, rather than threatens it.
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