We’re very happy —and pleasantly surprised— that our local school allows our “homeschooled” daughter to attend classes from time to time. Unlike what many might assume, Siela has plenty of friends there; she isn’t bullied or excluded, quite the opposite.
Still, this new arrangement seems to be causing a small revolution in the minds of the children, who know her as “the homeschooler.” The other day, a girl tossed at her: “You think you’re cool, but you’re not.”
It’s just the kind of expression you hear in every playground, but in this case it reveals much about what society really teaches.
Children are taught from a very early age that school is the world, not a social service. Everyone must go, not out of law or convenience, but out of reality. So when someone who doesn’t attend suddenly appears, the child may have felt something closer to metaphysical confusion than curiosity. It was probably hard for her to imagine that Siela could exist outside the rules that define existence, belonging, and identity.
Unlike a five- or six-year-old, this schoolgirl no longer sees Siela’s freedom as natural. She interprets it through an incipient moral language: being cool.
Being cool means posessing a desirable coldness. It’s an acceptable way of being better than others before the concepts of good and evil take shape. So when this girl accused Siela of “thinking she’s cool,” she was really defending the limits of the world she is being put into —a small, miserable world of appearances. From this new perspective, my daughter’s situation seems almost impossible. Siela could be the seed of a privileged adult —someone like Melania Trump, who does whatever she wants and calls it freedom. But you can’t be that cool.
And she’s right: Siela isn’t cool. She’s “different” in the same way that this girl perhaps once was, when she cried one morning and said she didn’t want to go. And they told her that she must —that it was her duty, or simply what everyone does— instead of something more honest, like: “I’m ashamed of what other parents would think if I didn’t take you.”
And so parents and children went off, each to their respective workplaces, to try or to avoid being cool. Like her parents, the girl spoke the language of the Other, but with a greater awareness. As someone who still knows what it is to be cool, or bad, she remains one step outside the Nation, outside that weary adult debate between privilege and equality.
“You think you’re cool, but you’re not.” A childish insult, and a perfect truth.