For many years, we celebrated Not Back to School Day with French-style crepes, a bonfire in the garden, bare feet, and sofa time.
For a few years, we celebrated this special day several times as we moved south in our travels as schools opened on different days in Denmark, Germany, France, and Spain.
Nowadays, I notice the “back to school” hype in the supermarkets: Pencilcases backpacks, in some countries uniforms, lots of lunchboxes and writing material, water bottles, and shoes for kids.
Them poor kids.
It is interesting how so much literature and many movies have a base element: Kids don't want to be in school.
Yet the adults in this society who, on the one hand, all recognize the fact most kids don’t want to be in the schools still believe they need to manipulate their children and tell them how great it is, how it is going to be so much fun, bribing them with new backpacks and pencils with glitter, new outfits, and more stuff.
There is so much wrong with this on so many levels. The consumerism. The denial. The manipulation.
Ignoring kids' emotional life.
Ignoring their freedom.
Living in a world where a new year equals a new backpack.
My grandmother literally had a cotton belt tied around her books as she walked 5+ kilometers to school. In the snow.
What is up with this world?
Yes, we can afford it now, but really, Can we? If the price is the fact, we all have to work all the time, all the way into stress and normalization of divorces, to sustain the lifestyle where kids need a diagnosis more and more.
And I, too, would have preferred not to be there. Did not see the point of it. The school was stealing my hours, taking me away from reading, listening to music, and painting. From spending time with my beloved siblings, looking after my home, helping my mother. And my grandmother.
Today, I celebrate our journey, which has now put us so far away from school that we even forget to celebrate Not Back to School.
And let me tell you something:
The grass IS actually greener here outside the matrix.
Love and light
Cecilie Conrad
Thank you for reading
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