adults ruin everything (a joke, mostly).
aka: complaining about my school board, the death of democracy, and youth rights.
Picture this: a school system creates something called "Personal Learning Time"; an hour where students can make their own choices about their education. Revolutionary stuff, really. For sixty lovely minutes between 8:30 and 9:30 AM, teenagers are trusted to use the time to make up a test, catch up on assignments, talk to a teacher, or decompress and prepare before the day's academic machinery kicks into gear.
Now picture the same system deciding that this modest gesture toward student autonomy is too dangerous to continue.
My school district is gutting PLT starting next year. They're reducing it from 60 minutes to 48 and sandwiching it between two regular class blocks, effectively neutering what little flexibility students had. The reason? A handful of parents complained that their children weren't using this optional time "correctly". Apparently, some students made the unforgivable choice not to show up.
So rather than address this as a family communication issue, the district has decided to solve it through institutional control without consulting teachers and students. Because nothing says "preparing students for democratic citizenship" quite like removing their choices the moment some adults disapprove of how they're exercised.
the great parenting offload.
What we're witnessing here is a symptom of a much larger problem that's plaguing education systems across North America. Parents, increasingly overwhelmed or unwilling to engage directly with their children's academic lives, have begun outsourcing parenting responsibilities to schools. Can't get your kid motivated? That's the school's problem. Struggling to establish boundaries and expectations? Surely the district can handle that.
To be fair, not all parents have jumped on this bandwagon. Many still engage meaningfully with their children's education (thanks mom!) and understand that learning to make choices--even bad ones--is part of growing up and developing independence. But my teachers have noticed an unmistakable trend: an increasing number of families who view the school system as a daycare rather than an educational institution.
This offloading creates a vicious cycle where parents demand more control over educational policies while simultaneously abdicating their role in their children's education. The result is that decisions about student life are made by people who spend the least amount of time with students, based on the complaints of people who have apparently given up on direct communication with their own teenagers.
The PLT controversy is a microcosm of this dysfunction. Instead of parents working with their children to understand how to best use this learning time, they've decided the entire system needs to change to accommodate their failure to engage. It's helicopter parenting at a policy level; removing student agency to solve a problem that better parenting could address.
the authoritarian creep in education.
This trend doesn't exist in isolation. Across North America, we're seeing an increasingly authoritarian approach to youth and education that should concern anyone who values democracy.
Politicians and parents are pushing book bans with alarming frequency, targeting literature that encourages critical thinking or present diverse perspectives. LGBTQ+ topics are being censored in classrooms, not because they're actually harmful, but because they represent identities that some adults find uncomfortable. Students face zero-tolerance discipline policies that criminalize normal teenage behavior, sports policies that exclude transgender students, curriculum restrictions on climate change and historical racism, restrictions on bathroom and water break use, and pronoun and name change policies that put trans kids into dangerous situations.
The pattern is unmistakable: when young people are exposed to ideas, experiences, or opportunities that might lead them to question authority, think independently, or exercise autonomy those opportunities are systematically eliminated by adults. The message being sent is that student voices, perspectives, and choices are not just less valuable than adult ones--they're dangerous.
As insane as this may sound, this is reminiscent of textbook authoritarianism, disguised by "parental rights" and "protecting children." But protecting children from what, exactly? From learning to make decisions? From being exposed to different viewpoints? From developing the critical thinking skills they'll need as adults?
the petition.
Students across my district have started a petition to save PLT. It's a beautiful display of civic engagement. Young people are recognizing a problem, organizing, and attempting to influence policy through proper channels. These are exactly the democratic values we claim to want to instil in students.
In spite of that, this petition will likely accomplish nothing. School boards, despite their supposed commitment to serving all stakeholders, typically only respond to parent pressure. Student voices, no matter how organized or reasoned, are treated as background noise in the democratic process that governs their daily lives.
This creates a troubling paradox. We teach students about democracy, civic engagement, and the importance of speaking up for what they believe in. Then, when they actually attempt to exercise these principles, we ignore them because they haven't reached the magical age where their opinions suddenly matter.
Teenagers are the primary consumers of educational services. They experience the daily reality of policies that adults make in boardrooms and committee meetings. They understand, better than anyone else, what helps them learn and what doesn't.
Moreover, the systematic silencing of youth voices creates citizens who are unprepared for democratic participation. If we don't value their opinions when they're in school, why would we expect them to engage meaningfully in civic life as adults? We are training an entire generation to be passive recipients of decisions made by others. We are training an entire generation to be pliant in the face of fascism (see: everything that is going on in the US).
The irony is that when students do organize and protest, adults often respond with surprise and pride. "Look at these engaged young citizens!" they exclaim, as if student activism is a happy accident rather than the natural result of young people who refuse to accept that their perspectives don't matter.
the root of all evil.
The systematic oppression of young people isn't just an educational issue. It's also the training ground for every other form of authoritarianism. When we teach children that their voices don't matter, that authority should never be questioned, and that compliance is more valuable than critical thinking, we're creating the perfect conditions for fascism to flourish.
Every dictator's dream is a population that learned early never to challenge power, never to trust their own judgment, and never to believe their perspectives have value. The classroom where student voices are silenced today becomes the society where dissent is crushed tomorrow.
Youth oppression is the backbone that supports all other forms of oppression because it normalizes the fundamental premise that some people's humanity matters less than others. It teaches young people, from their earliest experiences with institutional power, that hierarchy is natural. It conditions society's future voters and work force to recreate the same violence through this logic. If we can dismiss teenagers' experiences simply because of their age, it becomes easier to dismiss women's voices because of their gender, people of colour's perspectives because of their race, immigrants' rights because of their status, and so on so forth.
The PLT controversy will likely end predictably, and I won't be able to see this new system since I have graduated this year. But what I will witness is my generation exiting the public education system and into adulthood--and I am not sure of whether to be hopeful or afraid.