It is late August. The new backpacks stand by the door, labelled, and the house is quiet in a way it will not be once the school buses start running.
Education, in this house, has never only meant school. It has meant a long conversation about what the children are for, what I am preparing them to carry, and how much of that a classroom can hold.
This is a hub for the writing about that: the school year and its repeating form, and the harder question underneath of what an education is actually for.
The School Year, On Repeat
School arrives on a loop. Back To School, End of School, the first day and the end of summer, each year a small variation on the year before. Writing the loop down is how I catch what changed inside it while the calendar held still.
What an Education Is For
The other essays press harder. The Value Of An Education asks what I am actually buying with all of this. Why Homework doubts a ritual everyone else seems to accept. And the one about school shootings is the essay I least wanted to write, about sending children each morning to a place I cannot promise is safe.