For longer than I can remember, I wanted to be a singer. There was always music playing and and someone singing along — my mom playing R&B in the car home from work, my dad playing reggae in his office late at night, my grandma playing the gospel station on the radio by her bed, and my uncle playing all of the above at family functions on the loudest possible volume-level. I would read grade-school non-fiction with titles like, “What is Music?” I wore out every CD I could get my hands on whether it was Linkin Park or Jill Scott. I sang and performed, even when it was just for myself. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do more than sing. I didn’t want to do anything else.
The best thing my parents ever did was indulge me. For what must have been my 10th birthday, my dad got me studio time and came with me as I recorded a cover of Ciara’s “Goodies” with back-up from a karaoke CD. My parents signed me up for musical theatre every season, and my mom would help backstage, applying the right MAC foundation to the other Black girls in the production. They got me piano lessons through a family friend of theirs and bought a huge piano that they put in the house so that I could practice. Whenever I talked about being a singer when I grew up, they affirmed and encouraged me, with the only condition being that it couldn’t be my singular focus or come at the expense of my academics. It was an easy compromise.
Besides, school was a place where I could work on my dreams anyways. During our weekly assemblies in elementary school, I would look up at the middle and high schoolers performing in front of us and imagine myself up there. Every semester, when each class would present their own assembly, I saw that as my chance to shine, singing my heart out during the music portion with the hopes of scoring a solo next time. One year, I got as close as I ever would in elementary school, leading a group to compete in a singing competition with other schools around Dar. For some inconceivable reason, the Forrest Gump soundtrack was in rotation in the Simba Household and I convinced my group to perform “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” We promptly lost to a boy from another school who did a comedic remix of Rihanna’s “Unfaithful.” I was completely undeterred. There was no way I wasn’t going to be a singer.
Everything feels possible when you’re young. You’re in elementary school and you want to be Spiderman, you’re in middle school and you want to be a footballer, you’re in high school and you want to be a writer, you’re in college and you want to start your own business. You have no reason to be rational or realistic, you just dream and do. Either it’ll work out or it won’t, but deep down, you believe that it will. Why not you?
At their best, schools could and should be places of possibility. Where students realise their dreams and have them nurtured, supported by peers, teachers, and institutions affirming and encouraging their endeavours within the ecosystems of their school systems and beyond. A sports game where someone remarks that the striker could make a career of this. A play where it is discussed that the the lead will embark on a bigger stage. A science fair where the winner will go on to win a Nobel Prize, of course. At their best, schools get to be places where students’ futures are imagined and spoken about in ways where even the loftiest ambitious are presented as the most obvious and inevitable.
But for so many and for so much of the time, this is not the case. When some schools have opportunities that other schools don’t, from course offerings to extracurriculars to field trips, the number of options presented to students is that much smaller. When teachers pigeonhole and deter students away from their dreams in the name of helping them, they often hurt by shrinking ambitions. And in a society where one’s future is not determined by ability or effort, but race, gender, socioeconomic status, ambition, immigration status, access to English, and so on and so forth, students are told implicitly and explicitly about what dreams they should hold on to and which ones they should let go off.
What would an education look like that allows students to foster their wildest dreams for themselves?
Waterford changed my life in many ways, with one invaluably being the way in which it gave me the space and the permission to pursue my passion for music in ways that I hadn’t even imagined. My secondary school had a room in the Music block with desktop computers loaded with software like Fruity Loops that I learned to use to help produce my own music. I performed at different school concerts and events, even fulfilling a lifelong dream of starring in a musical when one of my classmates directed a production of Chicago and I played Velma. I continued to take piano lessons and took voice lessons too, later passing my ABRSM instrumental exams for both. And most critically, every Tuesday from 4-5pm, for almost 7 years, I sang with the school choir, even going on a mini-tour from eSwatini to South Africa and recording a full album.
But music was part of my education too. I took Music for my IGCSEs and in IB at a higher level, and learned about the history of Western music and its influence and legacy, and also about music from Asia, and the Americas, and of course Africa, and that heritage too. We had to write about genres and styles and do so with the depth and severity applied with other disciplines. We needed to compose original pieces where I wrote and recorded a piano ballad and a gospel piece made up solely of four-part acapella harmonies. Performance was my favourite, of course, where I got to sing “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontaus, “Saving All My Love for You” by Whitney Houston, and “Happens” by Sampha. And I got to do all of this in the presence of my classmates who were talented and inspiring, and we sang duets together and I listened to them play the saxophone and the violin, and we cheered for each other and complained about how hard the exams were, and as the class size got smaller and more exclusively female each year, I only loved it more.
Then, without me even realising it at first, the brightness of my dream began to dim. All the work that I was putting in revealed to me that as much as I loved to sing, I wasn’t interested in all of the additional effort. I was also coming to terms that I was a good singer but not a great one, and any potential future I had would likely require me to put in the aforementioned work that I was becoming increasingly disinterested in. More than anything though, I started to see that as much as I wanted to sing, there were other things that I wanted to do too. The writing that I was doing for English Literature and History classes quietly fostered within me a growing love of expressing myself and my thoughts through the written word. I was getting more and more interested by politics and political movements, from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, and I started to envision a future where I could make a difference, not as a politician, but maybe as a political advisor or through a non-profit. My dream of becoming a singer faded further into the background as others burned brighter and moved into the forefront.
Inequity is a dream killer. Those of us concerned with justice who bemoan against systems in which some kids have and other kids go without should feel hurt by this. There are students whose dreams are dashed not because of lack of want, but because they happen to be in a school that lacks the classes and facilities necessary to get them closer to theirs. Even more students are simply just unaware of all of the options that life has available for them. Until all schools are equally funded, adequately and appropriately staffed, and wholeheartedly supported by districts, state governments and surrounding communities, this will continue to be the case, with the most historically marganilized children left to bear the brunt.
Then there are teachers who, well-meaning or otherwise, are dream killers too. Many of us feel that we have a responsibility to prepare students for the future, and that includes teaching (certain) students to be realistic about their future, especially given the aforementioned conditions that we live in. But there are ways for us to evolve our understanding of what it could mean to prepare students for the future. We could listen to students when they tell us what they want for their lives, teaching them how to trust themselves. We could grow their dreams by expanding their skills set, teaching them how to be well-rounded individuals in whatever they do. We could weather their successes, adversities, and disappointments alongside them, teaching them that what matters is not them achieving their dreams, but them trying and trying and trying some more, learning when to keep going and when to choose a new path, on their own terms.
We don’t have to settle for the world as it is. We can fight for inclusion at the table and we can build our own tables. We can push for incremental change from the inside and radical solutions from the outside. We can create a world where we can all hold on to the ambition of our childhood, where we believed that if we wanted something enough and tried hard enough, maybe, if it felt right, we could at least get close. This requires more than D&I initiatives and applauding “Firsts” across fields, sectors, and industries, but making explicit movement towards including all and not just a talented few, to make space for future generations of kids who deserve a shot at their dreams, if they want to take it. And space to pivot to something else if they choose to.
Dreams change, and if you’re lucky, your new ones become better and more expansive than your old ones. A few years later, I was a college student, lying on the floor at 9 in the morning, pushing blocks in front of a grinning, toothless baby and the familiar feeling came flooding back, that this was something that I could do forever.
Sometimes I’ll look at an old photo of myself wearing an old piece of clothing and I can remember in my body how much I loved that top or those shoes and how they made me feel. I’ll look closer and try to remember why I loved it so much but sometimes I can’t remember how I ever even stopped loving it. Then the moment passes, and I remember that I am a new person, with a new wardrobe, and those old clothes wouldn’t fit anyways. My old dreams feel like this sometimes.
I was privileged enough to be encouraged to dream every dream I ever had for myself, and every child deserves the same. Access to an education that exposes them to all the world has to offer and invites them to place themselves in it. A love that pushes forward and picks up, from the home to the classroom to the school to the world. Our kids deserve it. We owe it to them to make it happen.