Beside the River Nile, the first school was founded
to teach that cumbersome new way of communicating—
writing. Students solidifying the message of the Pharaoh
on walls of temples, palaces, pyramids;
a reign enduring beyond the people and the time,
beyond the Nile and the desert:
a reign immortalized in stone, carved with fine strokes
and steady hands. Students spending their days to
serve their king, impart his views, paint his image,
while we watched.

Between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates, the second
school emerged teaching, again, the language
of crow prints. Students tallying wheat, writing property
deeds, centralizing the state, creating the law.
Little clay tablets, tall steles; the eyes of the eye
for an eye filling museums; seeing their own ‘Is’
through our eyes—
despite the space and time which pull them apart.

Next to the River Yellow, a third school rose
once more teaching writing, though this time creating
art in words; characters dancing to the music of the brush,
pausing only for the onlooker to catch up—
to take a breath. These students were the sons of mandarins—
their piety burned on sturdy
bamboo rods, left to preserve their fathers; our echo was lost.

Above the River Tiber, a fourth school grew
of math, philosophy, art, and, naturally—
writing. Here daughters entered classrooms
though still largely those of respected
blood. These little etchings on tablets:
changing the world, giving us prefixes
tacked onto every word and suffixes used—
sometimes erroneously—to create new
verbs, nouns, adjectives:
parts of speech that form parts of society;
even ‘educare’ gave us our education.

As knowledge continued to flow down
the rivers of civilization, a fifth sixth seven
school was built of wood then stone then brick. Slowly,
as the buildings got strong (they built their castles
quicker than our schools), education became something
for the lowly commoner too. Soon printed word was
everywhere. Writing down our thoughts, sharing them—
dare we even publish them? And we sure made
those stone walls tremble, those golden, glass chandeliers rattle
until their noble tintinnabulation turned in to a screech

and we knew our words had won. We taught our ‘teachers’
because they chained us,
because they cheated us,
because they choked us.
But we rose up, we stole their education, we liberated their education—
‘We made education equal,’
we’d like to say.

Beside the River Congo, next to the River Niger,
our emancipated schools lie within pollution,
yet we scour at these people like we judge
our forefathers for their sexist, elitist schools
which we say we changed: ‘we were the revolution!’
But now we stagnate. Our famous ‘education’ from:

Educare, origin: latin, lit. to lead out