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OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Ekow Amoah (Year 13) articulates the strangeness, for students, of getting ready to leave the place which has been their world for so long, but which is far from being the ‘real world’
Given that incessant sequences of lessons have a tendency to stupefy and numb the senses, the most significant punctuation to the school day, for me, consists of moments of aberration: a teacher breaking character, or a monumental task. The constant requirement for excellence on the part of students can feel overwhelming: an Orpheus-bind between wanting to look back, in order to appreciate the work we’ve put behind us, and being forced to focus on what’s ahead of us. Recently (I write this during the first part of the Lent term), things have felt exceptionally liminal. There’s been an odd air permeating the campus, in which all causes and consequences appear to be suspended as we wait for university offers. I thought much of that miasma would be dispelled by my own, thankfully positive, news, but knowing the unease persists for others doesn’t really allow me to breathe, free from the smog. Further to that point, all offers are conditional; they feel more like mirages than the miracles people interpret them to be. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the lauding and adulation are slipping through me or whether I’m slipping through them. The most important part of your education lies outside the syllabus, or so I am told. In consequence, I have to worry that what I am learning is a Greater Life Lesson: that when I move into adult life, which feels so imminent yet distant, things won’t necessarily go the way I want. Big whoop! Anti-climactic conclusion! Yet the insulation and mollycoddling, rectifying and rewriting, erasing and tippex-ing that goes on at school mean that for many of us this could be the first time things really haven’t gone the way we need them to. This is the Dulwich Experiment. There’s a charm in having OAs teach us – I’m sure they see the spectres of themselves running around campus – but there’s a danger in the alarming insularity and smallness it makes of our world. Dulwich College is physically and spiritually a Möbius strip, and it’s troublingly easy to forget there’s a world outside these four walls – a world which neither knows of us nor cares about us.
In some ways the anxiety is to be expected, especially given our interaction with teachers. The fourth wall of teaching is sometimes broken by a reference to life, which takes us outside the pages of Hamlet or an AQA maths exercise book, and whilst it’s nice to be treated as person rather than pupil, part of me wishes it’d all come sooner. Many teachers have been people since day one – with their individual personalities, idiosyncrasies and their modi operandi; equally, many have been totems – figures who live and breathe by the book and by party lines. This great transition of totems into people just as the exit door creaks open is somewhat tragic: it makes me re-evaluate all the teachers by whom I’ve been fortunate to have been taught; it makes me wonder what they wish they could’ve told us, and the jokes they wish they could’ve made; it makes me wrap my head around them as people before, during and after Dulwich and its four walls.
But the students; the students!
I’ve watched their follies and I’ve witnessed their vices; their faux pas and shortcomings I know too well. To think that these are the adults of the future – parents, managers or even just drivers! I know not whether to laugh or cry. The thought crosses my mind that I’ll be one too, and that sends shivers down my spine. Me? I know myself too well to consider allowing myself to drive, let alone connecting with all the other tortures and trappings of adulthood. Should age alone be a gateway to responsibility? Time is relative, and I don’t believe that this is exhibited any more glaringly than in the concept of ‘maturity’, the abstract index of intelligence according to which we prohibit and inhibit. Regardless of my misgivings, we Year 13s do, I realise, have to grip the reins of newfound responsibilities tight, and ride towards the dawning of opportunities. However, I suggest we approach the sunrise with squinting and caution, watching ahead, so as not to lose our way, or take the same missteps as those who trod before us.
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