The System That Broke Us, and the Hope That Remains

What if Curiosity were the Goal?

By Clarissa Enos Plagmann, The Neurodivergent Homemaker

I loved school. I loved learning. I loved being around my peers, playing with my friends, socializing, and exploring new ideas.

But I also remember struggling under the weight of expectations. 

I remember losing recess in 4th grade because I lost my math assignment in the classroom yet again. 

I remember the shame of remaining standing as my teacher allowed each of my classmates to sit down as she called the names of those she received essays from, and getting detention because I forgot to write my name on my essay in the 6th grade. 

I remember not wanting to go to school because I had forgotten to do an assignment or my project wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.

I remember being unable to stay awake during lectures, not because I was tired but because it was boring and my head hurt.

I remember not being able to focus because I was on my period and all the sensory problems and the pain involved with that made school unbearable.

And despite all that, I know people who struggled even more than I did.

But none of us had a choice. We had to go. 

The school system is broken, and not just in the United States. When kids are forced to go even when they’re breaking inside, and parents have no choice but to send their children to a place that slowly drains their light. When a system insists that one rigid model should fit every brain… that is a system quietly destroying kids from the inside out every single day.

It’s why I always wanted to homeschool my children. Because I realized they might not thrive in that system, and I thought I could provide a better environment for them to learn in.

Thankfully, for my own mental health, my oldest daughter who is in 1st grade actually loves being around her peers. She thrives socially and doesn’t want to stay home. But she still struggles with the expectations, the rules, and especially the unspoken rules.

Her IEP helps. It gives her a little breathing room, and allows for accommodations that help her thrive. But even with it, she often comes home upset. She’ll tell me she tried her absolute best to be “good,” and still wasn’t “good enough.” We comfort her, we tell her she is good, that we believe her, that her best is good enough… but still, that’s not what she hears at school from her peers and her teachers.

And I can already see my youngest daughter, in a couple years, quietly following the rules and masking at school, then coming home and breaking down once she feels safe again.

It’s not okay. None of it is.

And now the American government is working to dismantle what little protections disabled kids do have, protections that haven’t even been around for very long. 

When my parents were kids in the 1960s and 70s, disabled children weren’t in the same schools as their neurotypical peers.

When I was a kid in the late 90’s-early 2000s, they were in the schools but kept in separate classes, and by the time I was in 6th grade (around 2003-2005) they were slowly starting to integrate kids with disabilities into our classrooms for certain classes, but they were still mostly separate, until as late as the 2010’s. My younger brother who was diagnosed with Asperger’s as a child in the early 2000’s was kept in a separate class all the way through middle school and even in high school had only a few classes with his neurotypical peers. He graduated in 2018 or 2019.

Now, schools try to include disabled kids with their peers, which is amazing, but it’s still not enough. And lately it feels like things are starting to go backward.

And all I can think about is how different things could be if mental health were taken seriously.

Maybe the system wouldn’t feel so broken if kids weren’t expected to sit in classrooms for so many hours a day. If we didn’t expect the same things from every single child, no matter how different their brains, needs, or rhythms are.

What if school could be a safe haven for all kids?

What if it could be truly tailored to them? What if they could learn at their own pace, guided by teachers who act as mentors instead of taskmasters?

Imagine how much more our children could thrive if the goal of school wasn’t compliance, but curiosity. Imagine if we gave them room to grow, explore, and learn through experience rather than lectures, worksheets, and endless tests?

I’m grateful for my daughter’s school and her teachers. They put in so much work to help her thrive in a system that wasn’t built for kids like her. They truly understand her need for breaks, and for mental stimulation, and more direct language and visual routines and schedules. But there’s still so much more to be done.