[Written by: Sarah Fritshaffer]

Let the bottom fall out. I will be there. I will be rooting for its collapse. In its collapse lives the hope of change, progress, and vitality. 

I’ve heard the rumblings that education is headed for crisis, for a breakdown, for an ultimate end as we know it. I’m here to say yes to it all. I’m here to say — the crisis is now and has been unfolding for decades, the breakdown has already happened, and pretending it is in the somehow avoidable or distant future is a cruel untruth. It denies the reality that students and teachers are living each and every day. We have been patching the cracks and covering the holes and camouflaging the writing on the walls with fancy buzz words for years. Is it grit? Is it diversity? Is it intrinsic motivation? The answer is yes to all of this and no to all of this.

Clearly making incremental changes over time to create engaging and meaningful learning experiences has not been an option. The system has been weathered and marred by the years of perpetual struggle. Being part of a rigid and unflinching assembly line, stuck in an industrial revolution model of a school system that fails to recognize our students and teachers as human beings creates such an unrelenting weariness. A system who denies the individuality of students and has resolved to do more paperwork and testing to somehow satisfy the void we all experience. A system whose only saving grace is the very people they exploit, underpay, and overwork. As teachers, we have been saving, salvaging, resurrecting, professional developing, and doing the invisible hours to keep our deeply flawed schools afloat for decades.

Denying the complexity and dynamic reality of learning has been a colossal misstep in the process of educating our students. As I’ve transitioned from student to teacher in the public school system, it has been an eye opening, soul peeling, thrilling and terrifying ride. To feel so much responsibility, to have such a passion, and to feel so desperately powerless in a system that seems to have general disregard for people to be….well….people. 

As a teacher who loves education and values learning and loves her job fiercely, I have to ask you, what would happen if we stopped patching the cracks? What would happen if we didn’t try to research and paperwork our way out of this one? What would happen if we stopped pulling the all nighters and the crazy hours and we actually used the bathroom more than once a day and we had reasonable time to work with our students and we got to talk to our colleagues for more than five minutes in the hall about how crazy this all is? What if we started to reclaim our space as humans, as knowers, as doers, as professionals, as experts? What if we were trusted to teach what needs to be taught? What if we stopped teaching to the test and instead taught what we love? What if we stopped pretending that any or all of this is worth all of the self sacrificing that we do to make a broken system function every day? Where would education be now if we just…stopped buying into the buzzwords and started to dig in on the things we know in our bones to be most important?

Imagine who we would be.

Imagine who our children and young adults would become.