Unlearning the Bell

In classrooms shaped by the relentless cadence of the bell, the journey from obedience to imagination is fraught with invisible boundaries. This poem probes how surveillance and discipline can quietly overshadow the promise of learning and selfhood. Through the metaphor of the bell, it mourns what is lost—and what might still be reclaimed—in the name of democracy and education.

(A Requiem for Democracy)

First hour—
Bright with the promise of rupture,
She steps into an architecture of potential:
New campus, unknown maps,
A chorus of names she has yet to taste.
The world—raw material—
awaits her as text, as provocation,
its slate unmarked,
her heart scaffolding hope
to unlearn certainties
and make of knowledge a restless tool—
to create, to critique,
to loosen the weird logics
that anchored her world thus far.

School had been a panopticon:
Commandments circled the air—
"Don’t do this. Don’t do that."
Every vector a surveillance,
her girlhood doubly patrolled;
thoughts parenthesized,
desire redacted,
because "danger" (always lurking, often unnamed)
was scripted into her story
before she could spell her own.

Confusion as curriculum—
If monsters roam free,
why lock up the dreamers?
Why legislate silence,
when voices birthing questions
are the only things that change the world?
But dissent was recast as danger,
and love—of inquiry and possibility—
was disciplined out
by "we know best" refrains,
the soft violence of gatekeepers
clouding her mornings with sanctioned anxiety.

Instruction was memorized scripture,
to be recited, never re-imagined;
heresy to ask—
why these axioms,
whose logic, whose gods?
Sacrilege earned her silent exile,
a curse of unasked questions
handed down by pedagogic demigods.

So discipline scrawled its name
across every page of girlhood:
Routines weaponized as virtue,
time parceled into discrete slots—
bells a metronome against wander and wonder,
fencing off wildness,
bending her spirit into timidity.

Yet here—now—at the institutional threshold,
between past constraints and possible freedoms,
she stands as yet unwritten,
dangerous in her potential,
her wings bristling against memory,
ready to write new grammars
where fear is not curriculum
and wonder is allowed
to be unruly, to be free.

But then—rupture.
A mechanized shriek—bell slicing the air,
piercing marrow, quickening the pulse,
unveiling once again the haunted architecture
of surveillance disguised as sanctuary.
She stands at the threshold—
new temple of learning, old phantasms in tow—
as currents of dread and memory
flood her body, still echoing
the carceral rhythms of childhood regimentation.

She wonders—
Is the alarm external, or
an inheritance embedded within,
a phantom limb of discipline
trained by years of Pavlovian ritual?
The bell, that tyrant metronome,
her first tutor in hierarchy and subjugation—
a proclamation of who may speak,
who must submit,
whose imagination warrants erasure
in the name of order.

Every clang inscribed the lesson:
Disobedience breeds exile;
conformity cultivates safety
within the manicured thickets of docility.
Architects of her formation—
the ever-watchful gardeners,
mastering growth by root and branch,
uprooting “weeds” named wonder
and replacing them with hedges of obedience,
crafted for a future not her own.

The day she left the cage,
sunlight barged into her diary.
A bell-less dawn—blank and trembling—
she pens:
“Today, I begin again.
Today, I chase the untamed cacophony
of my wanting,
my inner wilderness no longer barricaded
by codes, whistles, watchful eyes.”
She marvels as possibility unfurls—
her mind, for once, uncaged,
words flying like startled birds
into enormous blue.

But—‘Triiiiiiiiiing’—
The summons returns,
prying open fresh wounds,
her heartbeat now in lock-step with a mechanized decree.
She recognizes: this is no phantom—
the old order reasserts itself,
this time gorgeously repackaged,
the jail now adorned with glass and space.
Freedom, recast as myth,
buckles beneath the consoling surface.

Her words scatter, her thoughts withdraw,
her imagination—a fugitive.
The dream of democracy,
of knowledge unmoored,
recedes as the iron machinery of surveillance
reclaims its lost territory.

She slips, with practised ease,
into the manufactured refuge
her schooling built—
a bunker of obedience,
where forbidden questions rot unspoken,
where only permitted desires bloom.

But beneath it all, a stubborn knowledge lingers:
True learning germinates
where bells fall silent,
where the omniscient eye of authority blinks away,
where “Big Brother” dissolves
and the lines of power blur.
Until then, the garden yields
only exotic forms—
dulled, engineered fruit trimmed of wild flavor,
a landscape cultivated for order, not for thought.

And the next generation, taught to prune themselves,
marches onward,
unaware of what could have blossomed
had chaos been allowed to root.