School: Flickers of a Dystopia

Winds of merriment danced around the classroom; the children’s chatter, jokes, and laughter filled the air. But the moment Teacher’s foot stepped over the room’s threshold, her shadow spilling through the doorframe and darkening the marble floor—every Student whipped their heads to the front of the class, and fell into Pin. Drop. Silence. 

Teacher perched at the head of the room, while the Students stilled their joy and masked their smiles. Teacher then gazed down at them expectantly, until they all stood up in a rustle of chairs and chanted together in a shrill and eerie chorus: “GoOd MOrniNg TeACHeR!” The words rang discordantly through every ear in the room, even after they’d sat back down and assumed more relaxed postures.

This was a daily affair at School. 

That paragraph would feel plucked right out of a dystopian novel—if most of us hadn’t experienced it most mornings of our childhood lives.

Dystopian media holds up a mirror to society not by reflecting our reality exactly, but by placing us in an exaggerated version of it; so that we can regard the oddities inherent in the world, outside the normalcy of everyday life—giving us a third-person perspective of the things we usually experience in first-person.

  Yet, there are no dystopian re-imaginings of school life in popular media. The Mysterious Benedict Society, Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, or the cult classics Heathers and Mean Girls might be the closest we have, the latter two being rather heightened reflections on high-school social dynamics, than dystopian satires on customs normalised in our minds. 

Almost 18 now, I have been unschooling since I was 9, leaving school a few months into third grade, and having switched school after school before that. 

So, whenever I scan my own memories of the five schools I've been to, or hear accounts of my currently schooled friends, I invariably see the potential for a dystopian evaluation of school life.

Think of the series of formalities one must follow to go to the bathroom. It is not a “when you gotta go you gotta go” situation where you can exercise free will. You must raise your hand, as high as you can for the teacher to see you, and still run the risk of being ignored. If and when you’re called on, you have to stand and announce your intentions to the class, face every eye on you, along with muffled snickering from kids with immature humours. (Basically live an introvert’s nightmare.) And after all of this—you can still be denied your wish. (I can’t imagine being a girl on her period.) The same goes for a sip of water. Doing either without the teacher’s hallowed permission leads to punishment. This forgoing of autonomy for such basic functions is a dystopian shade of school life, along with the student’s loss of individuality.

I’ve always found uniformed clothing to be the most painful way of murdering individuality. The outfits a person picks can say more about them than most words they speak. Even if no care is put into the choice, that indifference, and the unique style of it, can speak volumes about the wearer. But the existence of uniforms kills that colourful factor of external personality, and leaves everyone dressed in copy-pasted dark and dull drapery. 

Roll numbers too, seem like they strip away human identity, even though their roots might be simply in administrative ease. A student’s presence being registered daily by identification through a short string of numbers feels like something done to sci-fi droids, race horses, or prisoners—not how a long day at school should begin.

Another way numbers dictate student life is through grades, and the ludicrous amount of importance placed in them. Two or four digits and a decimal point become the main identifying factor of a person’s intelligence. Whether someone’s good in the subjects they care about or enjoy studying doesn’t matter; all that matters is that you excel in everything, and be better than everyone. Students, (and their parents) shed tears and screams over something as little as a half-mark disparity between their expected and received grades. 

How can someone’s worth be decided by testing them in fields they don’t want to pursue? Even having to learn something that you dislike or hate seems like a counterproductive thing to do for an entire decade. Wouldn’t one be more prepared for life if they could choose the subjects they enjoyed and give their hearts and minds to exploring it? That they aim the arrow of their intellect on the target they desire, shoot without hesitation and land a bullseye, switch targets and repeat, until they graduate and decide what target they want to empty their quivers on. Better that, than to hold a handful of arrows and shoot them in rapid, unseeing zips, along with hundreds of others shooting just like you, competing for the coveted centre spot. Arrow after arrow hitting targets every second, none with true aim or steady hands. 

As someone who spent half his life in and half his life out of school, I often see and think about all of the oddities it has, big and small, amusing or disconcerting. 

I see them through the eyes of the student I once was, as a reader traverses a dystopian world through the eyes of a character. 

Then I see them from a more distant lens, something that exists in my periphery, as a dystopia does when the book is finished, set down on the table, and thought about by the reader while they move on in life.

Written by Nikhil Mathew-Arora

Nikhil is an eighteen-year-old unschooler who adores consuming and creating fiction with a cup of hot coffee beside him, and music filling his ears. 

He especially loves the simple profundity of classics, the grand drama of Bollywood, and the charming comfort of sitcoms like Friends.