“Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and , through ideas, reinvent myself.” ~bell hooks (forever one of my favorite authors)

About a decade ago I would have never been able to see myself writing this. I drank the Kool-aid that schools were heavy indoctrinators even with a mother who was an excellent teacher. I thought college was a HUGE scam (and with the amount we pay it definitely seems that way). And don’t even get me started on diversity… 

I lived my life on a cycle of what people, usually religious, told me I ought to be… and I never felt whole. I was a mother before I knew I could be anything more. My life was an endless cycle of meeting everyone’s needs but my own and my mind was starving. My soul was aching. If you asked my father he would just tell you it was another one of my “wild hairs” waiting to be plucked just to put me in my place again. An endless cycle…

Then one day I had enough… I walked away. The said “Kool-aid” was killing me the more I drank it. I put the cup down and I did something little Shannon never thought I would do especially because I felt so stupid in grade school. I applied for college. My first day I remembered thinking to myself that no matter what was said or taught I would remain open-minded to new thoughts or ideas. I kept being warned that things would be pushed on me and everyday I expected that but that never happened. Instead I was prompted to look for myself and what beautiful meaning that brought to my life. To discover without being spoon fed. My whole life I was always taught what to think but school taught me how to think. How to evaluate. And suddenly my nights spent drowning in my Zoloft turned into a hunger for learning. For self-discovery and ultimately to explore the things I was never invited to understand.

This concept of ‘diversity of thought’ once terrified me now became my home. I craved deep in my bones for something to challenge my ideas. To make me sit in discomfort. Force me to learn and that when it hit me. Learning SHOULD make you feel uncomfortable and our culture has made us afraid of that. 

We have been conditioned through conformity of idea to sit in sameness. The cost of the educated is obedience for the ones who require that conformity. It’s why our schools have stripped teachers of their actual abilities to teach and tell us to water down our history or it’s considered “anti-American”. But when we reflect it is always the educated that scares the masses.

There are screams of “indoctrination” and “law and order” but anyone who spend half a second just looking for the truth will know education is the single most way to reduce poverty, homelessness, and crime while improving the economy as well as social and societal relations. But true education will always require diversity.

On Diversity

Now I am no specialist, just a woman with too many thoughts in her head waiting to be written out but diversity is also a qualification. We often equate sameness as being the most qualified. The resume that matches all the others is the one that should be hired. But diversity teaches us that qualifications are more than that. It makes us sit with the hard and consider the new. The people who thrive are the ones who choose multiplicity. 

I hope you sit in your discomfort and thrive.

Forever a student,

Shay