An Year of Disquiet, Repair and Quiet Recalibration
The year began, as years in this country often do, with noise masquerading as celebration. Rituals were performed, calendars turned, and optimism was expected on cue. Yet beneath the choreography of festivity, I carried a distinct unease. I had the growing sense of labouring for people who neither understood nor cared for the nature of education I believed in. Not education as a commodity or spectacle, but education as a moral and intellectual vocation. That dissonance, once ignorable, had become impossible to domesticate.
If 2024 was the year of resistance, 2025 was the year of reckoning. The previous year had demanded that I confront exploitation so normalized within the education sector that it had acquired the invisibility of habit. By the time January arrived, exploitation was no longer the central anxiety. A more corrosive question had taken its place. What are the moral boundaries of the education one is asked to impart. What happens when pedagogy is stripped of its ethical spine and reduced to procedural compliance.
I watched, with a mix of disbelief and fury, the systematic dismantling of a curriculum I had invested in intellectually and emotionally. It was undone not by ideological opponents with coherent arguments, but by functionaries whose authority far exceeded their literacy. History is unkind to such moments, though it repeats them with depressing regularity. One is reminded of the late Roman bureaucracies where administrators survived long after ideas had perished, or of colonial education systems where clerks replaced thinkers, and obedience replaced inquiry. I knew then that this was not a situation to be endured politely.
And yet, paradoxically, the personal sphere was marked by contentment. I returned to a home that was safe, warm, and unguarded. Time with my son anchored me to something elemental and restorative. I found new friendships that were unencumbered by performance or professional suspicion. I read with pleasure rather than obligation, and watched films both new and old with the quiet joy of rediscovery. These were not minor consolations. They were reminders that meaning often survives institutional decay.
In mid April, opportunity arrived, as such things often do, without ceremony. I took it, not with triumph, but with a measured resolve born of exhaustion and clarity.
Transition is rarely romantic. Entering a new environment was both exhilarating and disorienting. There is a peculiar strangeness in beginning again, particularly in a school, an institution that thrives on the illusion of permanence. But what redeemed the unfamiliarity was the arrival of students. Being entrusted with the first batch carries its own gravity. They deserve seriousness, honesty, and a refusal to condescend.
Teaching literature and Theory of Knowledge has always felt less like employment and more like alignment. Doing so with a new cohort only sharpened that feeling. I found unexpected sustenance in the company of younger colleagues who were intelligent, curious, and refreshingly unjaded. Their eagerness to learn was neither performative nor strategic. It was genuine. Sharing classrooms and, occasionally, evenings outside them reminded me that intellectual life does not end at the staffroom door.
If there was a unifying theme to 2025, it was learning, though not in the way institutions prefer to measure it. I read less literature than usual and more politics and philosophy. The shift felt necessary. In times of social distortion, returning only to one’s disciplinary comfort is a form of abdication. Understanding power, ideology, and epistemic manipulation seemed more urgent than refining literary finesse.
Artificial intelligence remained central to my thinking, as it has since 2024. Not because of novelty, but because of its profound impact on learning practices, especially in domains that once relied on slow thought, ambiguity, and creativity. I read selectively but attentively, less interested in evangelism or panic, more concerned with mechanics and implications. I learned enough to personalize certain tools, not as shortcuts to thinking, but as buffers against the bureaucratic tedium that now plagues academic life. Emails to irrelevant authorities, vacuous lists masquerading as rigor, reports destined for oblivion. Delegating these indignities to machines felt less like laziness and more like ethical conservation.
As 2026 approaches, ambition has given way to attentiveness. I want to inhabit my senses more deliberately, care for my well being without self dramatization, and read with patience rather than urgency. The aim is not acceleration but calibration. To begin slowly, to listen better, to arrive rather than rush.
History teaches us that periods of noise and distortion are often followed by quieter phases of reconstitution. I do not pretend to know what lies ahead. But I enter the coming year with fewer illusions and a steadier compass. That, I have learned, is no small achievement.
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