Sofia Isabelle Cabarroguis XI St.

Junipero of Serra
“The Liberty of a Fish to Climb”

Albert Einstein once said, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to

climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Fellow fishes, I stand right in front of you. A fish tasked for sixteen years to climb up and

down a tree, asked to breathe through its nostrils instead of gills and graded through the

execution of drills. Now tell me, to my so-called "dumbness" is this your prescription pill?

We are fishes resting inside the school system's bird nest, called out to be thrown out in

the air while the school system waits for our fins to become wings and splat! We fell, feeling that

we are stupid enough to flap use our fins to fly. And for this, I sue the school system for the

death of every student's individuality.

We are graded based on standardized tests like patients with different ailments injected

with the same prescription exactly like giving a flight competition between an ostrich and an

eagle. As said by Frederick Kelly, the inventor of standardized tests, "These tests are too crude to

be used, and should be abandoned." We simply compete among persons who each have a

complete different purpose than us. We obtained creativity in shading boxes, encircling letters,

and writing inside boxes boringly instead of thinking outside boxes. Perhaps, the system chained

our foot, hands, heart, and aspirations; being mewed in a large cage, finding ourselves in seas of

papers and strict orders. Perhaps we are being enslaved by the system; to function like any other

without finding our individual purpose.

Sofia Isabelle Cabarroguis XI St. Junipero of Serra
“The Liberty of a Fish to Climb”

Students are told to be locked up in one room, segregated by different cliques, lined up

inside classroom halls, obeying for six to eleven hours just like prisoners with heinous

committed felonies. Mentees are told to mimic what they see and asked to do what they are told,

just like monkeys, circus animals, and pets; treated as a product of the school system's factory

that produces one-shaped outcome. Each one is molded, sculpted, and built like artificial

intelligences, pushing us to know everything and do anything.

For the past centuries, it's funny how the arbitrary world have evolved, such as jumping

from drawing into caves to typing our thoughts on a piece of gadget we can carry around. From

spiral-wired telephones, we thrived into wireless phones that can just do it all. Everything has

progressed through the years, yet the rotten structure of the school system was never addressed.

Are we being prepared for the future or are we being held captive by our past?

As a fish held captive in a cage; I put the school system on the stand. You have been a

killer of faith in oneself, mass murdering creativity, uniqueness, and hopes. We are molded into

"perfect" figures according to what your standards asked you to do; tortured us students through

erasing imperfections, blocking us from creating our own identity. Like a fish asked to climb up

and down a tree, you abandoned our individuality in exchange for the pursuance of your

continuous puppetry.