Do we need another Nuremberg Court Session?

The prison/school comparison never gets old. There are a plethora of examples, analogies and scary similarities between these two places of pretence. Yes, we do learn things sometimes, but the amount of complete codswallop we are told pales in comparison to the amount of things we are told that will never serve any purpose whatsoever. Now that I have finished justifying my metaphor to all the bumpkins out there reading this, I will ‘get to the point’.

I recall, on the first day of our 9^th grade, the head of our hellish detention centre said something along the lines of ‘...we are capable of comprehension, we are not Nazis here’. I also remember finding this statement had a strange defensive tone. Exactly one year later, on the beginning of this school year, the same phrase was reformulated but nonetheless lurking within the crooks of his speech, like a small fine print trying to make itself scarce. The second time around, I started to ponder: what if they are Nazis? I indulged myself by going even further in the analogy. Somewhere in this train of thought I came to realize an ironic play on words. The school wants us to concentrate. A school is full of kids/teens...like a camp is. I’ll let you make the link yourself. But, as these things usually do, they don’t stop there. After reading a book by an Italian survivor of the abomination that happened in Hitler’s Germany, I started seeing SOME similarities between both establishments: The various languages, the exchanges of food, the fatigue, and a few other less prominent likenesses. You could also argue that intolerance is an issue (shocking from a school that proclaims itself a partisan and user of a certain internationally renowned way of learning). I’m not talking about racism per se, but a form of ideological war. Several employees of the school are partial to the strong nationalistic sentiment that has developed through the years in this nation. Due to this ridiculous (arguably violent and vindictive) conviction, they punish any use of the English language outside of the English class. Yes, it is in the rules that only the one language is usable to communicate, but when 40% of the students speak perfect English, adapting is, on some level, necessary. You’d think, to be fair, they’d look out for people talking in all the other languages out there too, but do they? We wish. You could probably speak Mandarin or Esperanto wherever you want, but speak English and you get yelled at.

P.S. I do not intend to offend anyone by referring to the Holocaust. I also acknowledge that our pain is mental and nothing near to the pain suffered by the people in that genocide.

Lime