peter
“It’s funny when people ask my opinion about the education system. I feel like I’m not really qualified to talk about it, simply because I wasn’t part of it. I mean, I was in school until I was like eight-years-old but I can’t remember much anymore. I only remember that I had a rough start. I got bullied a lot. I wasn’t perceived as an intelligent kid, I was slow and because of that, the teachers gave me a hard time as well. For a very long time, I was convinced that I was stupid… I am dyslexic but I only ever experienced it as a negative thing while I was in school. My parents decided to ‘homeschool’ me and my brother. Growing up, obviously I had my doubts and every now and then I would approach them saying that not going to school is wrong, I should be in school, that I’m ruining my life this way and it’s all their fault! My father would say, ‘okay, you will start school next year’. But in the back of our minds we both knew it would never happen. It was like when you have a ‘lazy day’ and you don’t get much done and you feel kinda crappy about it because you were meant to do A, B and C but you didn’t. My parents were like that with our education. It wasn’t like in school where you have to sit and listen and wait for your turn. They were like, ‘we should sit you down and make you read some books’. But that never happened… There was no plan. The way we learnt basically everything was by simply asking questions all the time. They would try to answer all of them. If, for example, my father didn’t know the answer to a question or we didn’t understand his answer he would get pissed off and would research it until he could explain it to us. -And for us, the questions never ended. I still don’t know how they got away with it but here I am, a fully functional grown up just with a little more creative space in my head, and yes, I know what 7 times 8 is.”