Dear Mommie and Daddy:

I'm writing this because I've tried and tried to talk to you, but you won't listen. Remember how you felt after we saw the movie Lumumba? How you realized that there are so many more pressing concerns in Africa that the present educational structure does not address? That's how I feel each day. But I'm going to college. And not because I feel the need for it to enhance my knowledge - in fact, I feel as if it will keep me away from the knowledge I truly want to acquire. However, I'm going to appease you.

I don't believe in a society in which people willingly shut themselves up from the world to study books, contemplating representations of life but never experiencing life itself. Well, you may say, that's just how it is, and you'll have to go along with it until it changes. But it never will change if people keep going along with these absurd credential systems. It is refusal that brings about change. It takes people saying NO and succeeding in terms that far surpass the acquisition of high grades without the aid of formal education.

We wait for some distant revolution in which everything will be radically different, but the only way to bring that about is to start living our lives the way we want them to be now.

Living your life the way you want to now, in the present, is revolutionary in itself. It takes the examples of people living as if something actually depended on their actions, pursuing their true desires, and existing outside of the current system to inspire others to do the same. Once enough people are doing this, real change has occurred.

For a large portion of my life thus far, I have spent the majority of my time doing things I did not choose, simply because you wanted me to. I think it's important for me to start living according to my desires, to have truly fulfilling days, to value enjoyment and enriching experiences right now rather than sacrifice them in ever-increasing years of preparation.

I am exasperated with thinking of living as something that happens to me, not something I'm actively engaged in. I don't enjoy this feeling of everything being planned out, and counting down the days until graduation is not an ideal way to spend a year; there's barely anything I get out of it.

I have spent quite a bit of time preparing for the future, and now would like to embrace the present. I feel as if time spent in the rigid structure of school teaches nothing but subservience; blind, unquestioning obedience to authority; and the ability to engage in short-term memorization, though never truly retaining anything after regurgitating it for a test.

School is essentially preparation for the workplace and nothing more, a holding cell to squash out individuality, independent thought, and any dreams people naturally, as human beings, possess before convinced that they are futile and useless. Anything that does not appear on a worksheet or a test is dismissed as unimportant, when it is these things that cannot be graded that truly matter in life.

Schools were introduced along with industrialization, and they teach us to despise learning rather than to pursue it; to abandon the search for knowledge when outside of the confines of the classroom, because by the time the last bell for the day sounds, my mind is too fatigued to take anything else in, and thus I ignore the things that truly matter to sleep and recuperate.

When the world is becoming more corrupt, polluted, and exploited each day, it is absurd to be shut up in a classroom, wasting time in front of a professor rather than pursuing the things that truly make me passionate, and trying to make immediate positive changes in the world around me. Emerson said that, "We are always getting ready to live, and never actually living," and this truly reflects the nature of schooling, be it secondary or college.

I am currently ignoring enjoying myself and not doing things that are personally fulfilling for an abstract reason; to prepare for the future, and, more specifically, a good job. However, I'm already aware that it is only through doing the things that I love that I am content, not through receiving a large monetary reward for them.

Grades put my classmates and I in constant competition, making us memorize things for the purpose of recalling, and not retaining, them. Tests do this as well. I thus "learn" to get a good grade, not for the sake of acquiring knowledge. Teachers often emphasize not learning, but memorizing the facts necessary to get a high score on a test. They don't even pretend to be providing knowledge; they admit that they are merely stating the information I must memorize to get a good score that in essence tests nothing more than my ability to memorize useless facts with little or no relevance to my life. The stress that comes along with grades and tests in unnecessary, and leads to depression, loss of interest in the things that truly hold importance, and constant fatigue.

Each day, more of my convictions dissolve under the depressing fluorescent lighting that illuminates my school. I must wake up at an unnatural hour that even doctors and scientists condemn, and spend nearly seven hours being force-fed information. The bell rings and my classmates and I are herded from one classroom to another. I learn far more from the books I read, through conversation with truly knowledgeable people outside of school, and through the volunteer activities that I do. However, this would be so much more magnified if the requirement of schoolwork did not impede upon what I'm able to do even when outside of school.

Over the summer, I often read a book a day, and many people in academia counter that it is through reading that we learn the most. However, once the school year starts, the tedious work carries over into my time spent outside of school, and I must thus further abandon pursuing a real education. By the time a school day has ended, my mental resources have been exhausted, and I'm only able to sleep. Not only do I spend nearly 35 hours a week in school, shut up away from life, but it's set up so that very little of my time can be spent doing what actually intrigues me.

Most of my time is relegated to schoolwork, be it at in a desk in a classroom or a desk at home. This is only magnified in college. Adolescence is the time in which people are most apt to discover the world around us. We have not yet been made cynics by the so-called common sense and rejection of dreams taught in school and the workplace. But rather than experience the world around me in this time, I am forced to spend most of my time in a desk in front of a teacher, and soon to be professor. I see the outside world most often though a window, and am not allowed to go out into it.

It is difficult to be constantly force-fed a lot of useless, and often false information and still maintain my belief system. I have been attempting to do this, and it gets more difficult with each passing second. I cannot read things that have not been assigned in class, or work on the things that hold actual importance to me. Instead I'm forced to answer multiple choice questions, fill in blanks on worksheets, and recall useless information.

I'm sure you think that college will be far from this, but the basic structure is the same. There is a focus on theory rather than action. There are core requirements, and thus you're forced into taking classes that may not interest you. Time is designated to class, study, and work, rather than spent doing things you truly enjoy. Even if I take a class in political science that I enjoy - I would much rather embark on an international volunteer program in which I help build houses in an African country than write a paper on the economic instability there.

It bothers me when I realize how much I could have actually learned in the past had I not been in school, but I am appeased when I realize it's not too late to start now. I believe that if I complete this school year and dive straight into another structured, imposed environment, being constantly bombarded with assigned reading, essays, and papers to write, I will lose the passion and independent ideas that I currently possess.

I am being pounded into submission, and want the process to discontinue. Even the classes that deal with subjects I enjoy twist what I like into tedious work, an obstacle to be overcome rather than an experience to be enjoyed. Once something is required and made into essay questions to be scrutinized rather than celebrated, it's no longer enjoyable. I enjoyed English, until we began to, rather than personally enjoy and relate to what we read, perform "left-brained, even cold-hearted acts of literary criticism" upon pieces.

I am tired of being told one more year, or four more years, or any other estimate of time left to be discontent. Thoreau asked, "Did you think you could kill time without injuring eternity?" and I realize that the more time I spend putting the pursuit of a real education on hold, the harder it will be to maintain my mind when the convictions, opinions, and requirements of teachers are constantly being forced upon me.

I'm fairly certain that college will consist of writing papers that evaluate the technical aspects of literary works but omit the emotional response I have to them, the things that truly matter about a work. I will write papers on the plight of the environment rather than take action to slow the destruction of the Earth. I will put aside the things I truly want to focus on that give me fulfillment to read assigned texts and analyze them into nonexistence.

While bombs drop, mines explode, people and animals succumb to extinction, whole countries are bought and sold in the name of free trade, countless evictions take place, the stomachs of children growl while farmers are paid to destroy their crops as to keep prices low, I will be taking notes at a desk.

I want to learn how to farm organically, make furniture from Earth, play the violin, learn how to fix bikes, learn how to make houses dependent on solar power, have nothing stifle my creativity and thus be able to write without distraction, continue photography, start art projects, learn African languages, travel, learn to knit, make and sew my own clothes, study Quantum physics and astronomy, further my work on independent media, and engage in many more fulfilling pursuits.

Though it is far from what I want for myself, I will go to college. But to maintain my own sanity, this is why I must take a year off.

Love, Your Daughter