borrow to learn

If you have to borrow to learn — 
borrow to earn,
then tomorrow’s your turn
to pay for the knowledge
that should’ve been free.

If you’d rather be blissfully wrong
that hope is all gone,
then don’t lead me on
or make me believe
that you’d envy me.

A head full of facts
won’t help me relax
about paying it back,
so grant me reprieve
and just let me be.

Notes:

Short poem but it’s a topic many people can relate to. To be a student is to have a desire to learn. And a quality education isn’t something that should come with a life-crippling price tag.

Many people I know who are now working adults have had their wallets dented because of school. I mean come on—school. The thing you need in order to be a thriving working adult in the first place.

Maybe your loan wasn’t even for the purpose of tuition itself, but for other necessary things like room and board or extra funds to pay rent or living expenses because your school was in a city you couldn’t necessarily afford to live in with the salary of a working student.

Anyway, I won’t go too much into the controversy. Nor will I regale you with my own personal sob stories. The poem here is short for a reason. It’s because it should be so crystal fucking clear to humanity that the capacity, the opportunity, the pleasure to learn and expand our minds—without burden or worry or stress or the fear of future economic repercussions—should be something closer to a natural right.

I think it’s kind of wrong to sucker young kids who have barely learned anything about how to manage their finances into borrowing huge amounts of money at a time in their lives when they don’t even have a concept for what it would mean to pay that kind of sum back in the real world.

My only hope is that this problem becomes one of those things our society looks back on in the future and feels embarrassed about. Like how on earth could we do this?

A good well-balanced education should be accessible to those who want it, regardless of whether they can afford it. The current way will only cause people to resent the idea of learning itself and regret having tried to scale the otherwise worthwhile mountain of higher learning in the first place.