how we forgot to read ourselves
“To be truly educated is to know how to be fully present.”
- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
I have been reflecting on my time as an educator. I’m writing the dissertation for my PhD right now, and thinking about the ways that, when I came back to teach in public schools, reading and writing were already being untaught. Writing was used as punishment, something students were told they were always doing incorrectly and not an act of love for their own thoughts and mind. Reading, too, was hollowed out. We talked about it constantly, but then assessed through multiple-choice questions.
I know that schooling was built to keep us obedient, and now I see how the disregard for reading and writing is part of the same mission: to keep us distracted. The decline in literacy among adults in the United States is not an accident, it is the intentional result of a system that benefits from a population unable to think critically or independently. (According to the National Center for Education Statistics, roughly 21% of U.S. adults—about 43 million people—fall below basic literacy levels.)
Presence gets talked about like it’s simple. “Be here now.” “Live in the moment.” But being with ourselves isn’t simple at all. It takes daily practice. It asks us to stay long enough to notice what our body feels, what messages we’re suppressing, things most people are wanting to avoid. But that's why we need practice.
Writing has always been where I meet that part of myself. Reading, too. Writing lets me uncover what’s underneath and sometimes I don’t even know what I’m trying to say until it’s scribbled onto the page. Reading, on the other hand, teaches me how to listen. Together they become a slow practice in seeing what’s actually here, a type of mirror.
I listen to a lot of books, but reading and holding the page, letting my eyes trace the rhythm of words, this trains my attention differently. Reading is focus practice. It’s devotion disguised as leisure. When I read with my whole body, I remember what it feels like to stay with myself and to not let my mind be pulled in a thousand directions.
The more I learn about presence and spirituality, the more I see how our attention is being co-opted and harvested. Someone once said the most valuable thing in the world isn’t gold or oil—it’s attention. Social media has made that literal: views and clicks translate directly into money. What we give our energy to gains power, value, and momentum. Every second we spend scrolling becomes a small act of energetic exchange, feeding a system designed to keep us tethered to distraction. Our focus is currency and we’re giving it away for free.
It’s also why magic works. Spellwork is simply focused attention—energy intentionally directed toward transformation. It’s never about what you have. You can do magic with nothing but yourself. The herbs and candles help symbolize the intention, but the real ritual is your focus. Uninterrupted, concentrated focus is creative power. It can change the shape of the world in front of you.
I once used a spell to get a job I’d applied for. I regretted it later, but it worked. That’s how I learned that focus, when clear and consistent, is power. And that’s exactly why schooling, media, and capitalism work so hard to train us out of our own. Because attention is power.
When I came back to the U.S. after teaching abroad, I took a job at a private religious school. I thought it would be an easy transition. I’d just finished teaching at an Islamic school in Abu Dhabi, where I’d already learned how to edit myself, to choose “safe” texts. But the censorship here was different. It wasn’t about what we read, instead it was about how we learned.
At this school, my students weren’t allowed to write reflections. Literally. My principal told me, “I don’t care about how the students feel about what they’re learning.” And made me tear out the one page reflection questions from their midterm exam. In protest, my grade 10 students wrote reflections anyway.
For me, that was almost unthinkable. Reflection had been the center of my classroom, a simple ritual at the end of the week. Ten minutes on Fridays. Students wrote about what challenged them, what made sense, what they might try differently next time. It was a quiet practice, but it changed everything. The goal wasn’t grading feelings. It was teaching metacognition—how to think about how we are thinking.
I’d learned in Abu Dhabi how transformative that could be. My students often said the reflections helped them see themselves differently. I still remember their words years later, how their stories shimmered with realization. I still have a folder of their reflections in my closet, their reflections showed they were learning more than I could have imagined. It’s strange how education can be so alive in one place and so hollow in another.
What stayed with me most wasn’t the policy itself, but the mindset beneath it—the belief that feeling has no place in learning, that mastery of content mattered more than meaning.
Later, in public schools, reflection still had to fit inside a formula. When I was observed, I was expected to follow a script: a stated objective, a measurable outcome, a clear assessment at the end. Teaching had to perform with certainty.
We all knew the tests didn’t measure learning. Every teacher could name the problems—the bias, the shallowness, the way they stripped reading of joy and writing of truth. And yet, we kept doing it.
There were data meetings where we spent hours sorting cards with students’ names into color-coded piles based on their test scores. Thirteen multiple-choice questions became the shape of their potential, we all knew it was bullshit. It was obedience to a way of knowing that had nothing to do with learning.
When I asked questions, I was told to “just do what you’re told.” When I tried to imagine a different way, it was framed as idealism, as not understanding “how the system works.” When I was observed, I was told to spend more time “preparing students for the test.” But teaching them to find the right answer felt like teaching them to disappear.
We were untaught to read for pleasure, to write for self-knowledge, to think with our full selves. And those are the things that sustain us.
In my own life, I keep returning to the belief that reading and writing are portals back to aliveness.
When I write, I locate myself in the moment and give life to my inner mind. When I read, I open space for another consciousness to move through me. Reading and writing are acts of presence.
It resists the systems that fragment us. It resists the pace that confuses noise for knowing.
I want pedagogies that honor slowness, mystery, the unknown—ways of teaching that ask not what did you produce? but what did you notice?
That’s what I hope to keep exploring through my writing now: the ways reading and writing can still bring us home—to ourselves, to each other, to what bell hooks called education as the practice of freedom.
Maybe the work of being human isn’t about learning more. It’s about remembering what we’ve always known—attention as devotion, language as love, and learning as a way of coming back to life.
