Students Need to talk about difficult topics like

by Lila Ben-Yehuda

Schoolis the place where creativity and differences go to die.

You enter it, full of ideas about the world, and how you might want to contribute to it. But as years go on, the differences between students fade together as the become about how to be a good student; how to get those good grades. By the time you are out of high school, you know how to solve for x, how to read the table of elements. You do not know how to truly help society, you do not know how to persuade people, nor do you know how to manage your finances. You are a product of the American learning system, a factory that punches out kids who are all the same.

School should be a place where creativity and difference thrive. Where, at the end of their educational career, students are all different; contributing to our country in different ways.

In 2019, I was in sixth grade. It was the second year my middle school was open. It was as good as new. Well, that was until the winter, when swastikas were found in the second-floor boys’ bathroom. Small ones, big ones, they were scribbled everywhere, along with phrases such as “hail Hitler.”

At the time, I was one of only a handful of Jews in my grade. A lot of my friends wore crosses on their necks and spoke of Christmas as soon as November came around. I was struggling to accept my differences, and that being Jewish meant being a minority. So when this happened, I felt personally attacked. I felt like I didn’t fit in at my school, like part of me wasn’t acceptable. It made me feel like my classmates hated me. I was already struggling with social anxiety, but before the incident, I had a pretty good handle on it. Suddenly, I was paranoid that it was one of my friends who wrote that, with me in mind. It consumed me for about three months. Flash forward, it’s

2020. I turn 13 this year! It was the year of my bat mitzvah, the celebration of a young person becoming a Jewish adult. I was becoming a better writer and speaker too. I had gained back my confidence and was ready to use it.

During those three months, more swastikas were drawn. In an attempt to make the kids who drew the swastikas sympathetic, the school dedicated a day to learning about the past of the Jews, but the school only focused on the Holocaust. My family, like almost all Jewish families, was affected by the Holocaust; my great-grandfather was the only one in his family to survive it.

The day made me feel like the Holocaust is all people see when they think of Jews. No one thought of much else when it came to the Jews, I learned.

It pained me to think that that was how my people were seen--victims of a terrible genocide.

I was in seventh grade when the last of the swastikas were drawn. It was in February. As it happened, I was due to write an essay in English about my identity, and where I see it in 5 years. I saw fit to take these swastikas as an opportunity to talk about my Judaism, and how being at my middle school affected my overall view of the culture and myself.

I asked my teacher if this was okay to write about, seeing as it could be seen as a little sensitive to some. To my surprise, she said no. She said that I was too young to truly know the whole meaning behind the Holocaust, too young to have that deep of a reflection of who I am. But the truth of the matter was that I had already been exposed to real-world situations, such as the swastikas and the kids who drew them. My teacher shutting me down made me question everything, again. Was this part of my identity not good enough? Am I blowing this out of proportion? If I did write about this, would I not get a good grade? All of these questions were bouncing around in my head, and it messed with me.

I ended up writing about a sport I played and how it affected my physical health. I got an A, though I never stopped wondering what would have happened if I had chosen my original prompt.

I also learned something I’m still trying to unlearn--that the easy prompts that are unoriginal are the ones that get you good grades. Sticking to the easy and safe path is preferable. This prompted me to lose my sparkle--what made me different. I switched up my writing style to one I knew my teachers would like.

I almost fell victim to the terrors of American teaching. I was lucky enough to pull myself out of it, but not everyone can.

My teacher should have said yes. She should have said yes to the other unique prompts people wanted to write about. The genocide of the creativity of students is silent, but it is significant. If students were not forced to risk a bad grade to write about something consequential, our country could welcome a new generation full of brilliant, beautiful, and different minds.