The school year opens with familiar rituals: children and parents at the gates, wide-eyed, anxious, often the parents. Soon the headmaster speaks, the priest blesses. Tradition lingers: national pride and faith declared first, while hijabs, migrant voices, and other spirits stand quietly. Energy and diversity fill the courtyard, a strength only if we choose to see it.
Public schools are Cyprus' most multicultural, diverse in real terms. How do you respond to a blessing that isn’t yours? How do you engage with words that contradict your own culture? Do you absorb it? Do you take it in? School, is about how much you can take.
Private schools face different struggles: relentless pressure to excel, happiness tied with achievement, the absence of shared identity beyond individualism, and the weight of privilege mistaken for belonging.
Every morning, the gates open and the future walks in, at its best and worst. Girls excel and claim their ground. Tattoos, piercings, long nails: signs of self-assertion. Nowadays, bullying has a name, and sometimes it is confronted. Progress begins here, in voices still unaware of their power.
Shadows and demons also arrive. Some children enter already tired, burdened with worries beyond their age. Vapes in their pockets, a parody of quitting before they’ve even begundrugs in corners, gambling on phones. Violence erupts so often that police presence feels routine. Grooming lurks in chatrooms, nude images circulate, leaving unseen scars. Abuse and silence remain close.
Then comes the official load: a heroic past endlessly rehearsed, ignoring that outside the classroom, strategizing shapes everything and new ideas race ahead. AI, financial and media literacy, sexual education, strategic communication, alongside Gaza and Ukraine, reminders that history rarely teaches anything.
These should be central to learning, yet appear only superficially, tick-the-box additions never absorbed. And real social problems grow faster than reforms can catch up, faster even than the beautiful hair of teenagers growing wild. So what is the real priority? The avalanche of the past, repeated in ceremonies and textbooks? Or the skills children need for the lives they are already living?
Because in the end, school is what? It is about whether society dares to teach its children for the world they are entering, or whether it will keep preparing them only for a world already lost?
