Knowledge Day 2011
Twenty years of independence, and a first of September when the children starting school had no memory of anything else.
Happy Knowledge Day.
A small piece of arithmetic that struck me that year. The children walking into first grade in September 2011 were born around 2005. Independence, in 1991, was twenty years earlier — a date from before their parents were adults.
For that cohort there is no before. No comparison, no inherited memory of another system, no sense that the country is a recent arrangement. It simply is the country, the way a country is to a child.
That is how a state becomes normal, and it happens on its own, one first grade at a time.
To everyone with flowers today: a good year.
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