longer.blue

~ My Education Dissolving ethnicity Adopting family ~ This spare, three-line poem is a radical manifesto compressed to its absolute essence, and the capital E in Education — implicit in the title's weight — signals that this is no ordinary schooling. The writer invokes Education in its highest philosophical sense: the Socratic unmaking of inherited assumption, the Enlightenment promise of reason over dogma, the lifelong process of becoming more fully human by shedding what was imposed rather than chosen. Against the backdrop of Bosnian-Croatian heritage, where Education was historically a tool of ethnic and religious enforcement — Catholic schools hardening Croatian identity, nationalist curricula weaponizing history, the Ustasha regime making fascism a civic lesson — to reclaim Education as a personal, sovereign act is deeply subversive. The capital E announces that the real curriculum begins precisely where the official one ends. "Dissolving ethnicity" performs this Education in action. The Balkans' 20th century demonstrated with grotesque clarity what happens when ethnicity is treated as destiny — genocide, displacement, neighbour turned executioner along lines drawn by church and state together. Both Christianity and fascism functioned as ethnicity-crystallising forces in this region, one blessing the bloodline, the other weaponising it. To dissolve ethnicity is to refuse both laboratories. It is not self-erasure but self-liberation — the educated self recognising that the category was constructed, and therefore can be deconstructed. "Adopting family" is the graduation. Having dissolved the assigned, the speaker builds the chosen — and the word "adopting" carries deliberate, legal, loving intention. This is not drifting into community but actively selecting it, the way one selects an idea worth believing after discarding ideas inherited by accident of birth. The poem's Education, then, moves in two clean strokes: first the critical dismantling, then the creative reconstruction. Three lines enact what entire liberation theologies and political philosophies labour volumes to say.