Through the lens of a decade, I’ve watched the education system mold and morph before my eyes. 

Those two eyes, brown and bold, unchanging as my body grew up, the same mind, just a little wiser. 

I’ve watched the silver-screen plasma effect of a school board shift beneath my feet, I’ve felt the power and the powerless, I’ve grown and I’ve lost.

And through the years, the countless tears and yearnings for just a little better, a higher grade, one more award or trophy, I’ve gathered the A+ corner slips in a box beneath my bed.

I’ve held tight to the validation, it’s morphed and contorted into the fuel driving my beat-down engine.

And yet, through the benevolent teachers and shrinks, one small promise, a supposed beacon of just  enough hope has powered the poor-oiled machines of this generation.

Our own world.

Isn’t that the goal?

Isn’t that what we’ve been promised, proclaimed, and prophesied to hold in our hearts when the time is right?

It’s cataclysmic, it is, the way we float with the world on our backs.

With the title of “tomorrow’s leaders” plunged deep within our palms.

And yet, all this pressure, the shallow tick tick tick of the classroom wall clock, the added textbooks, the metal detector line-ups, the do better, do more, be more self-pushing, all of this weight and we still do not know who we are.

See, we know the geography, we know the suburbs and the elementary schools, the first steps and the tree trunks, we know the family lines, and yet.

And yet we do not know who we are or where we are from.

I’ve traced the lines, I must confess, I’ve followed the dock down to the stream, I’ve dipped my toe into the riverbanks, and I’ve let the current sweep me away to the deep end of a truth we claim to want.

And while I may not speak for the millennium, I speak for myself, and sometimes, just, maybe sometimes, that’s enough for the rest of us.

I am from the creativity birthed to seem interesting.

To force the idea of academic validation deeper, deeper, deeper into the mind of a girl so adept at studying that she has forgotten the ways of ignorance.

I am from the poetry and Plath and debates and Dickens, I am from the land of the learning, am I not?

The upturn of my shallowed lips, the harp, the chorus, the string of praise floating from the letter grade of my English test to the smiles plastered upon my mother’s mouth; the validation.

The validation that comes from the synonyms for education.

It’s embedded in the “you’re not enough” counterarguments. 

It’s the “you are doing well, you are going to go far.”

It’s the belief that maybe the consolation is more than such. 

It’s the fig tree, the endless and tireless imagination of lifetimes I’m sure to morph into. 

It’s the home forged in the bell jar, the ancestry from Socrates and Plato, its the irrefutable love of learning, the love of living. 

Yes, they say that ignorance is bliss, but haven’t we found heaven in the knowing? 

Haven’t the classes and courses, brought more joy than the numb? 

Isn’t this very poem, this very sonnet of realization, has it not been carved in the margins of a book? 

Yes, there may be irrefutable danger in the aware, but there’s promise in the flames. 

The adventure, it’s what carries the tide and brings us the harvest. 

It’s what strives to birth our society, it’s the learning, the knowing, the growing. 

Education, education, isn’t that our true home?

Where we’ve crawled from the tomb, the weeping being of our mother, the textbooks, the testaments, the real and the raw, it’s our family line. 

We jeer at the sight of our writings, but isn’t that what’s right and true? 

For without the comprehension, are we not just shapeless bodies floating without cause with no place to call home, are we not just moons circling a broken planet? 

And yet, yet with all of this fury in our homeland, in the realization that our mother is the education, yet we still do not know how to carry the world. 

This narrative, yes, the perhaps fabricated streams the system tells us to believe, its grown and shifted, and yet it hasn’t fully changed.

For throughout the plethora of school boards and societies, one thought, though perchance cliched, remains true.

We are from the education, and yet, it is from us.