Everyone’s high school experience is different. Some of us graduate early, some of us late and the rest graduate right on time… that’s how it goes right? What if that was all wrong…?

There’s so many expectations on us to graduate on time despite the education system lacking. The pressure is on us (Canadians) young as 4 years old to get up at 6 or 7AM and run into a classroom filled with others kids we don’t know anything about -to do tasks that we may not even enjoy doing- let alone help us develop skills we need as adults to survive the world that we’ve built as a society.

Ever heard the saying, “If you can’t beat em’ you might as well join em!” I think about this a lot when it comes to the education system and what it means to be a high school graduate in Canada today. If Socrates or Wilhelm Wundt found out how we learned in schools from a young age, I think they’d go mad to be quite honest.

Just imagine the thoughts they would have: Why are these children being stunted? Waking up so early they couldn’t even remember a lesson taught if they wanted to! It seems like a sick joke to expect a young brain to remember something before they even eat a slice of toast! Has the world gone mad? Yes. I believe it’s always been mad, seething for more madness even though it’s not needed. Society lost itself when we seen our ideas as a competition instead of trying to learn something from each idea, we took one (capitalism) and ran with it. Learning should be fun right?

Back to reality. The reality of graduating highschool in Canada is not fun. Can it be done? Yes. Have lots of Canadians graduated highschool? Of course. Have many more Canadians failed or dropped out of highschool? Absolutely.

The evidence is overwhelming, especially during COVID. I was lucky to get out of highschool before the pandemic locked us down, so having online school and textbooks is new to me. Now though, this is the reality of graduating in Canada. You need internet, a laptop, a certain browser sometimes for things. Growing up we talked about the chalkboards and textbooks disappearing but now that this is reality, what can we make of it?

¹ My heart and mind goes out to the young kids and single parents that struggled through COVID and into now to make ends meet just so they could have a good chance to graduate. I was that weird kid that never had working internet. I was the 10 year old ‘angry’ kid you see at the coffee shop breaking down because I didn’t understand an assignment and I had no parent there to help me understand. This home life is the very foundation that children build their education on. If the home life fails the child, there is little to no education system in place, in many cases the child learns to teach themself through trial and error. In many cases, these kids drop out because they need to provide for themselves, not because they have privilege to fail ¹  

This is the reality of graduating high school in Canada. I’m sure you can relate… Ever skipped a class?

Slept in and missed class even though you really wanted to go that time?

Went to school without food or a water bottle?

Didn’t pass a test because you didn’t have the study materials?

Was discriminated against (race, gender, sexuality) by a teacher or school staff?

***This happens more often than you would think in Canadian school systems, especially in the Northern Regions where Indigenous people are denied equal education and often go missing, suspicious amounts of ‘suicides’ are on the rise in Canada. I say suspicious because this systemic behavior stems directly from Canadas foundation built on genocide. Missing and murdered Indigenous Women and Children never had the chance to graduate highschool in Canada. This is a fact. I believe it needs to be addressed by the Government, yet it probably never will.

The Reality of Graduating in Canada is not pretty. It is for the ¹privileged¹(see above) to say the least. Just because you have a highschool diploma does not mean you can get any job you want. Many people I know have gotten jobs without their highschool diploma because they’ve worked longer, or they wrote a good cover letter to the job they wanted. In the end, you need some kind of privilege to graduate highschool in Canada and get a job.

Yet we all have a choice, even the ones who hold the most privilege in Canada (straight, white males) decide to drop out because it’s “cool” and they want to skip class like their friends, not knowing the reality of the situation. In the same world, people from another country with less privilege can come to Canada and graduate before the privileged ones I mentioned above. The older I get, the more it makes sense to me. People with privilege have nothing to lose, nothing to gain. In their minds, school is an option for them because chances are they already have their future planned out by their family. Inheritance is a big thing in Canada and not many people are privileged enough to know what that means. Those who do know what it means tend to take it for granted.

After a few weeks of college sociology, psychology and philosophy classes I feel the need to come to some sort of conclusion now before I end these posts, but the reality is that I don’t. HA! The reality of everything is getting to me lately, could you tell?

I’ll do my best to keep The Existentialist up to date, but the next few months are going to be a whirlpool of events. Before you know it I’ll be reminding you its 2024 and it’s almost been ten years since Nicki Minaj dropped that radio song ‘Anaconda’ – oh and Pharrell Williams dropped ‘Happy’ – can you believe that was almost 10 years ago?!

The longer I write, the older I feel. Time to go do young people shit before its too late.

Stay rad,

emriyus

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