#and maki as the teacher's pet student best suited for this environment best suited to thrive but she's ACTUALLY here

[vegaseatsass]

Home School ep7 spoilers/thoughts

So this year when I was looking for paraeducator jobs, I got discouraged pretty quickly, because every public school opening in my area was a special ed position that employs traumatizing compliance therapy (ABA), and I would not be in an opportunity to question it or intervene. (I ended up finding work outside the public school system to avoid this, but yeah it's fucking bleak.) So Home School really hits as this story where, okay, some of the time the lessons seem like they have merit, the students seem like they're getting some deep true learning out of it - I get a little scared that maybe the narrative is going to tell us this kidnapper troubled teen industry boarding school prison in the woods is Good Actually - and then it reminds us what happens to non-compliant students. Run has been locked up for SIX YEARS; he is a full adult at this point. That's NUTS. The medieval behaviorist approach is taken to its extreme here, and sometimes the teachers induce the apparent behaviors they want out of the kids, but far more often the entire class is just suffering a shared experience of pure psychological horror. I think it's interesting that they included an autistic character in Pennhung, and his time being locked up was actually supposed to be protection from weird eat-your-babies mind games, NOT punishment, and it was still so obviously traumatizing to him. But these teachers don't care, and are sure they know best and what these kids need (along with the parents who signed them into this against their will!!!), even/especially in the face of the students directly telling them they're wrong. Anyway was just really struck by this ep7 scene of Amin yelling at Run that he's going to keep him until he gets the old, compliant, favorite-student Run back. In the same episode that gave us least compliant students Jingjai and Hugo with no recourse to defend their completely reasonable perspective, or to protect their burgeoning relationship, which the narrative is making clear is sincerely good and healing for them. It's just all very interesting to me!!

I am bringing my own American context to this series, with ABA and the troubled teen industry, whereas I'm sure the show is saying a lot about specifically Thai issues and school culture (and society; thinking of The Eclipse where the school is a metaphor for Thailand/the Thai government). I really want/need to learn more about all of that! But even as a cultural outsider, I love what it's doing with behaviorism and compliance and abusive adults, and those dissonant moments where it feels like we should be rooting for the students' compliance because they're about to learn a Very Important Lesson, but actually /Run voice: HOME SCHOOL IS HELL. Dearly hope they will all band together and make themselves ungovernable. This place has nothing true to teach them.