They Teach Us to Write, But Not to Speak

This essay is about how school teaches us to follow rules, but not to question them—how we’re taught to write five-paragraph essays but not to say what we really mean. It’s about how systems reward silence, especially from kids who are too loud, too angry, too much. I talk about how institutions shape language into a tool of control, using thinkers like Freire and Foucault, but also my own experience of being told I was “smart” as long as I stayed quiet.

There’s a strange paradox that lives inside of school walls. From the very first time we’re taught to hold a pencil, we’re told that our voice matters. That the stories we carry are worthy of being told. And yet, somehow, the older we get, the clearer the rules become: you can speak, but no object. You can write, but only about what they’ve taught you. You’re free to think, but not if you ask the wrong questions. Education — the thing that’s supposed to empower us — so often ends up becoming the system that teaches us how to shrink.

The quiet truth is that the system was never built to raise thinkers. It was built to produce obedience — packaged neatly as excellence.

In Discipline and Punish, French historian Michel Foucault maps how institutions — schools, prisons, hospitals — all operate through the same logic: surveillance and control. He states that “[v]isibility is a trap” (200). When you’re being watched and have to focus on grades and perfection, you stop focusing on what makes you you and what makes you the perfect student. Foucault would argue that this isn’t accidental. It’s design. Control dressed as curriculum.

This same logic plays out across movements. Students speaking out against what they believe in are punished by schools claiming that their voice matters — You can write a paper on justice. You just can’t ask for it. Nietzsche once wrote that “[h]e who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” But what happens when the how is a school that teaches you to survive by suppressing your voice? Schools reward sanitized speech — the kind that’s been stripped of risk, stripped of rage, stripped of its teeth. And yet, nothing true has ever been soft enough for a rubric.

This is especially sharp for students who are queer, disabled, first-gen, neurodivergent, or of color — students for whom education was never just a system, but a site of resistance. Because when your very presence is already seen as political, your voice becomes dangerous. And danger gets detention slips. Philosopher Jacques Rancière argues that politics begins the moment the “part with no part” speaks. True politics is not when we write what we’re told to, but when we disrupt the order that has told us what is speakable in the first place. Rancière calls this dissensus — not just disagreement, but the act of breaking the frame altogether. 

Schools teach us to write. But not to dissent.

And yet, we speak anyway.

About the Writer: Naomi is the head blog writer of Lavender Liberty. A first-gen student and writer, she blends personal narrative with political critique, using philosophy, literature, and lived experiences to challenge dominant narratives and center marginalized voices.