# Marked by France: My Experience as a Failed Student _2025-12-21_ I was born in France and raised, in part, by its public schools. I was, at first, a model student. My mother—a preschool teacher—and my natural dispositions had prepared me well for what France calls the “primary” years of schooling. But things began to change when I started middle school, as I struggled with depression and an increasingly formal teaching style. High school only got worse, and I soon experienced a profound and liberating rupture from the entire school system. Against the expectation of most of my teachers, friends, and family, I recovered and eventually thrived as an independent adult, but the second half of my childhood was permeated by my struggle with school. I see its mark in my decision to leave my home country, when I reflect on my mental health since then, and particularly as I’ve come back to school 15 years later. Because formal schooling depressed me so much and for so long, my learning approach today is largely self-directed and experiential: I follow my curiosity, relying on books and the Internet, and I try to connect knowledge with my experience of life. Most importantly, learning must happen in a compassionate environment, where I feel respected and supported. ### The Experience I was, by all accounts, a bright kid. Top of my class through “école primaire”—the French equivalent of elementary school—I skipped a grade and kept going strong. I loved learning and school kept me effortlessly engaged. I remember being introduced to math equations—I must have been around 9—and delighting in learning that X = 5! I thought then that X must have always been equal to 5—I didn’t yet understand the concept of a variable, but I was piecing things together. I felt eager to know more and for teachers to reveal their secrets to me. Like most kids, I was also eager to grow up, and I welcomed my graduation to “collège” (middle school) with nervous excitement. Over the next 8 years, as I worked my way through the grades, that excitement would wane until I had lost all enthusiasm about anything school related. In retrospect, I now see that I was depressed, but at the time I had no idea: I was just a kid, trying to make sense of an increasingly demanding environment. I did not understand why most of my hours were now spent mindlessly sitting in class. We had textbooks, you see, but most teachers seemed to think the best use of our collective time was to handwrite their paraphrased version of the lessons. Hour after hour, teachers would slowly dictate to the class. First, I was bored. Soon I was struggling to get out of bed in the morning. I hated being in class. I watched the wall clock obsessively—trying to wait as long as possible between glances, breaking up the hour in my mind: “already a quarter of the way there, just three more quarters…” I still wanted my teachers’ approval—I wanted to do well—but I was exhausted, and I felt strongly that my teachers were to blame. It was, after all, their job to teach, and I was not learning. The teachers didn’t see it that way. They told me to suck it up and work harder. They encouraged me to transfer to another school where I would be someone else’s problem— “you’ll like it better there!” I did not. I was overwhelmed by exhaustion and frustration. My grades fell off a cliff. I stopped doing homework. I had once been a top student—now I was a pariah. Going to class each day meant getting called out for not doing work, taking exams that I knew I would fail, and being met with bad grades and disapproval. Eventually, I stopped going altogether. ### The Impact I became—unsurprisingly—distrustful of schools and institutions. I felt that I could only rely on myself. I read books and perused the Internet. I leaned into my passion. I struggled with being disciplined, but I was obsessed with computer programming. I loved building silly websites and solving logical puzzles. Each step felt rewarding as I oscillated between research and practical application. After a few years of intense experiential learning—about as long as a college education—I landed my first software engineering job in San Francisco, where ability was prized over college degrees. Unbeknownst to my old teachers, I had proved my long-standing theory that, under the right conditions, I could learn, and I could succeed. My confidence was bolstered, but I was not over my school experience. For years, during one of the most impressionable periods of my life, I was repeatedly told that I was not doing enough, I was not working hard enough—I, was not enough. And I internalized this feeling. In my journal, just a few months ago, I wrote: “I forced myself to go to school when I hated it. I berated myself every day for not doing enough. I was very hard on myself. . . . I’ve had to learn how to take care of me.” ### The Present To this day, I’m still wary of formal schooling. I’m back in school now, but only because my dream profession _requires_ a degree. I need asynchronous online courses where I can study at my own pace and in my own home. Writing assignments feel particularly challenging. My perfectionism kicks in, I reflect on every word, every turn of phrase. In general, I am confident—I believe I can do almost anything I put my mind to. But when I know that someone will read and judge my writing, I am often overwhelmed with anxiety and doubt. Writing for myself is easier, as I reflected recently: “I forgot how much I love writing . . . Why is it that writing to be read by other people is so hard? _School._ I remember having fun, being edgy, writing school papers, getting bad grades. They demolished my self-esteem.” And so, I have to be gentle towards myself. I start homework early and take a lot of breaks. I breathe deep. I never set a goal without letting myself know it’s OK if I don’t reach it. I am enough. I am enough. I am enough. ### Conclusion As a teenager, I was a complete misfit for the French educational system. I had an intuitive sense that the problem was a lack of engaging pedagogy, but my teachers and the system at large abdicated responsibility, blaming me instead. I was a child fighting a cultural behemoth, and I escaped with deep emotional wounds. Forced to rely on myself, I found informal ways of learning, like books and the Internet, and in that environment I thrived. Initially, I wished that teachers would find ways to engage me in their lessons, but it seems clear now that what I really needed was the freedom to investigate my own ideas. I needed to be valued for who I was, not scolded for my inability to memorize arbitrary facts and conform. As an adult and a lifelong learner, I must continue to prize and honor my own curiosity above all. If it brings me back to school, as it has for the purposes of learning to practice psychotherapy, I can count on—and continue to develop—my ability to support and advocate for myself. I have my back. I can do this.