Here we are. The tightly packed aisles of the Library are teeming with parents accompanied by children of all ages who are leaning over, lists in one hand, fluorescent markers in the other, over bins overflowing with erasers, calculators, glues and other boxes of colored pencils. True to my habit, I thought I would buy school supplies at the last minute, always to cultivate in me this irrepressible need to brush the limit of everything, still subject to this strange imperative that makes me feel alive, resilient, still a little oppositional. However, I faltered on August 15, almost two weeks before the return to school, which, for me, is a record. This Friday, I will have paid a little more than $200 for my daughter who will start her second year of elementary school next Tuesday, and an almost equivalent amount for my son who will enter his second year of high school. Having also, since 2008, made school purchases for my three stepchildren, I am able to see how inflation affects not only the prices for each item, but also the quantity of these items, as well as the specificity, in terms of brands, colours and textures, which will be required for each of them.
Like all other spheres of existence, public school is now also extending itself into a form of capitalization of the living, walking hand in hand with neoliberalism. It will thus be necessary to choose the plastic “presentation cover”, orange, not red, not cardboard, not with pockets, with three staples, not the one, still usable from last year, because that one, oh! misery, has pockets. I come back to it with you every year, at the start of the school year, you will excuse me, I come back to it as to something that I never really come back to in fact, as if I refused to celebrate this way of forcing us to spend, as if we were collectively always blind to all this anxiety generated by this list in so many families. Already, socioeconomic inequalities are drawn on the shelves of the Library, they which will be inked even more, once in the schoolyard, in the color red, that of stigma.
My two children attend public school, but they are fortunate to take part in a vocational music program. It will cost me, for both, a little over $1,500, at the beginning of this year. Which is not excessive considering the excellence of the education they will receive, but which will nevertheless weigh on my budget, which is not among the most to be pitied. This year, I will once again have a thought for all those who will not be able to embrace music due to lack of payment, without regard to their “vocation” precisely, the one they may never know they carried within them. These abandoned potentialities have the same effect on me as an abandoned garden; an impression that we would have to unfold reality in several versions, including those where we would have held until the end the pampering of the plants, the watering and the exposure just to daylight, to see what would have become of all these magnificent seeds. The education system, whether it is two, three or four-speed, simply no longer engages the meaning of some people, too embedded as it has become in a logic where equality of opportunity is shrinking like shagreen leather, over the years when it does not arrive, this revolution which would give school its rightful place in our political decisions.
The same goes for the services that we, the shrinks, offer to these same children, whom we increasingly neglect, to take refuge in the cozy comfort of our private offices. I do not blame us. I understand that we have difficulty keeping the human at arm’s length in systems that talk to us about everything except the human. Nevertheless, the older I get, the more the years of gap widen since the day I left the school environment to practice in private practice, the less I can bear to no longer offer my welcome, my listening, my love to these children for whom my office, at the school where I practiced in the 2000s, was sometimes the only known place of safety. I still cry often, silently, those tears that we keep to ourselves, thinking back to that little boy, neglected since birth, who reached second grade, like my daughter this year, by a kind of miracle, like those abandoned plants that grow in force in our gardens or on the edges of our highways. Every week, I would go and pick him up from his class. He didn’t know what I wanted from him. Deep down, I didn’t really know how to say it either. Since we couldn’t find the words to talk to each other, I had the idea of going down to the basement of the school with him, to that place where an old piano was lying around, a relic from the time when his school was run by nuns. I would play whatever was dragging my fingers through and then he would lie down against the body of the instrument, close his eyes and breathe deeply, as if something inside him grasped everything that music offered him, that kind of appeasement necessary for living. We repeated the ritual for a whole year, far from what school psychology was supposed to be, with its intervention plans, its objectives and its evaluations, especially. It was not school psychology and yet I think it was, preferring to imagine that there remains in him, this adult of today, something of this all-encompassing, of this mothering offered by the sound box of an old piano.
When the start of the school year approaches, at the end of each August, when the ambient air is filled with autumn, I think back to all those children who are preparing to hope, far beneath their already defensive behaviors, that school will put in their path adults who think of education as more than just spending. Teachers, technicians, educators, daycare educators, psychoeducators and other stakeholders who know how to cultivate a garden, with all the love that is sometimes lacking in their home. So, to get out of the boxes drawn by dollars, visible from the purchase of school supplies, there could be something beautiful, like an old piano that rocks a child, like a public system that lifts everyone up, like a society that truly takes care of its children, like a whim that is not one, like an egalitarian education, something like that, which would start next week.
That would be so beautiful.