Barely two years ago, I was free to say and write what I wished. I was a student of pedagogy and education, and it was imperative that I constructed my own approach and philosophy of teaching, before I was unleashed (or booted out) into the real world. After a frantically insipid year, alas, it was not to be. I have learnt far more in the last few months as I study curriculum theory, and one of my first lessons was that my opinions now matter more than ever before, but I am unable to speak them.
Opinions count for much more than we are willing to admit. So much is unsaid in this country that we suffer from a stifling, pregnant silence everywhere we go, and as we become entrenched in our thinking and roles, we find ourselves unable to speak. Acquaintances becomes friends, colleagues, new individuals, students become graduates, family structures evolve. Each new role that we take on is another albatross around one’s neck, delineating in a single label all that we can and cannot say, and consequently, what we can and cannot do.
Such a deadening miasma cannot be healthy; I write here anonymously, but you know who I am, so why can one not sign off with a flourish after every incomplete thought? Are we so naive to take everything we hear or read at face value? Should I be so cruel as to give an answer? So much time is spent decoding oblique statements and references, reading subtle gestures and discovering context that our very mundane lives become artifically difficult narratives, painful to bear and hardly worth the effort. In the movie ‘Liar Liar’, Jim Carrey’s character can do nothing but speak the truth. However, it is impossible to imagine what it would be like if we had to tell the truth for a day, for in the first place, most would have very little to say. And then entire lives would crumble and falter as we come to terms with all the newfound colour that would spill out of our atrophied minds; there would be love, hate, admiration, liberation, realisation, fear, the entire gamut of human experience that we are constantly suppressing and pretending to experience. It would then not be our thoughts and narratives that would be found lacking, but our very own unequal natures, this in itself an unbearable idea.
And so on. There is nothing wrong with oppression, as the thought goes, as long as you are not the oppressed, nothing wrong with silence, as long as you have nothing to say. Several weeks ago, my lecturer exhorted us to speak our minds and ask all the frivolous, unanswered questions on our minds as she spoke. It was impossible, of course; in that class, as in many others, many are quietly answering their questions, or judging them, even as they emerge from the gloom of their thoughts. Their constructed paradigms endure for as long as their intellect and stamina can support them, before they silently crumble and fade away. I must slave within the system, and then be old, decrepit, of no consequence, before I can speak my mind.
‘All teachers should be critical!’, goes the new rallying cry in class, and at the back of our minds we are thinking, well, everyone should be critical about everything, but it would be fatuous to say that out loud. We squirm when someone quotes Socrates about the unexamined life, not because we disagree, but because it strikes a (quickly ignored) chord, because most are unable to begin. Or even speak.