The Comforts

Bren Kelly
4 min readOct 10, 2024

The Suffering School Causes

I am the flag before you working as someone
I am the flag before you working with concrete [photo by author]

School isn’t supposed to cause such suffering for kids. Or maybe it is. It’s such a special gift to feel pain and suffering for others. But they only seem to teach math when most just learn to hide their discomfort at missed success, a discomfort of lost perfection get tucked away inside.

My daughter failed a math test, and it was devastating for her. I couldn’t drop her off at school and force her to go see her friends.

So, I sat in the parking lot of the middle school thinking of all the damage done by learning. She was in the back seat, ashamed and crying. It’s just a test. It turns out she might be kicked out of the science Olympiad club. She’s done it for two years and the rules are you can’t fail a class or do worse than a C or something.

We can’t design schools to ensure the suffering of others and see the humanity in each other when the shame is revealed. I’m worried about the cost of her future and the value of herself.

Why do most kids deal with being classified downward, in a ranking order where the top is judged as perfect and their worth self-determined by that comparison? The road outside the coffee shop where we sit, where I’ve taken her, is packed with cars moving on to work, many of them new looking from the recent boom. There much be one, as the average household income…

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Bren Kelly

Engaged in new Ideas and old Inequalities, dismantling the system in systemic, born on the 50th Anniversary of Women's Lib Day, still seeking injustices.