Preparing for Yesterday’s Problems Whilst Tomorrow Burns

The View from the Margins of a System Designed to Forget Us.

A reflection on returning to school in a collapsing system, where CE courses prepare no one for the crisis ahead—and a poem for those of us already writing the future the curriculum forgot to imagine.

Introduction

The teaching profession is under attack. Not in the metaphorical sense, but in the structural, calculated dismantling of one of the last remaining public institutions still tied—however imperfectly—to a notion of collective good. The neo-colonial, neo-liberal looting of the free public school system is no longer covert. It is happening in plain sight, gaining momentum through policy, disinvestment, and judicial fiat. The Supreme Court’s recent decisions have made clear the far-right’s intention: to redirect public funds toward religious and private institutions, under the guise of “school choice,” whilst starving public education of both legitimacy and resources. They’ve packed the courts and positioned themselves for this very moment. As a special education teacher, I can see where this road leads. If they succeed—and they are succeeding—what remains of public education will be hollowed out, leaving only the parts too expensive or unprofitable for the private sector to absorb. That means the likely survivors are the special day classes—elementary school placements for disabled children with high support needs—programmes no one is lining up to monetise. So I’m back at school, taking continuing education courses in counselling and early childhood development. Not for prestige, not for credits, but to prepare. To make sure I’m ready for what the far-right has in mind. These are 101-level classes, designed to introduce students to the field. Foundational, they call them. And yet, in all their foundational certainty, there is no space for me. No acknowledgment of the systems I already know, the futures I am already bracing for, or the people—like me—who will be on the receiving end of this ideological purge.

The Absence – No Windows, No Mirrors

There’s a particular kind of ache that comes from reading a book that gestures toward inclusion, but quietly leaves you out. The textbooks we’re using—Becoming a Helper and Orientation to the Counseling Profession—were both written years ago and have only been modestly updated since. The world has shifted. We are in the midst of profound reckonings around race, gender, disability, neurodivergence, and power. And yet these texts still speak in the calm, orderly voice of assumed neutrality. They offer checklists and bullet points about “cultural considerations,” they name racism and poverty and gender inequality, but they do so at a distance—like facts to be known, not conditions to be lived. There is no felt sense of urgency. No account of who gets left behind when a framework imagines diversity only within the lines it already recognises. They seem suitable—comfortably so—for the neurotypical world. They work, perhaps, for students whose cognitive and communicative styles map neatly onto the expectations of counselling as a profession. But for someone like me—a gestalt language processor, an autistic, trans professional who understands the world in patterns, in metaphors, in systems and ruptures—there is nothing. Not even a misrepresentation to argue with. Just silence.

This isn’t merely about invisibility. It’s about preparation. These texts shape the worldview of future professionals. They’re the first step in forming the lens through which these students will encounter others in pain. And what happens when they sit across from someone like me? Someone who doesn’t speak in neatly ordered sequences, who processes relational tension through sensory resonance or poetic logic, who arrives not with “insight” but with a scattered web of connections that require deep listening to decode? These texts do not prepare them. Worse, they prepare them to miss us—entirely. To mislabel, misread, or misunderstand. Because people like me are not part of the imagined future of this field. The books have no windows into lives like mine. And they certainly offer no mirrors.

It brings me back to the title of my earlier book, No Place for Autism?—a question I asked then with cautious hope, as if maybe things were shifting. They were not. And they still are not. The question has become a refrain. The absence of people like me in these courses—foundational, they insist—is not a passive omission. It is an act of erasure that shapes how future helpers will define help. What they will recognise as valid expression. What they will know how to hold. These courses are not just silent on people like me. They are preparing professionals who will carry that silence into their work. And the harm, once again, will be ours to carry.

The Stakes – For Autistic People, Gestalt Processors, and Beyond

The stakes, for people like me, are not theoretical. When future professionals are trained without ever encountering autistic ways of being—especially those at the far edge of the spectrum, like mine—they are not just unprepared. They are armed with frameworks that actively obscure us. Gestalt language processing, sensory-based meaning-making, non-linear cognition—none of these appear in the texts. Not as differences to honour, nor as valid worldviews to understand. And whilst my own experience may seem niche or rare, it is emblematic of a broader omission: neurodiversity in its entirety is largely absent from these foundational courses. The term might get mentioned in passing. Autism might appear in a DSM-aligned list of disorders or challenges. But no attempt is made to engage with what it means to actually be autistic. To speak in resonance. To sense in pattern. To struggle not with logic, but with translation—being constantly asked to reshape your knowing into forms someone else will find familiar.

In navigating these courses, I find myself continually re-translating. I answer the questions as written—tidily, briefly, in the style expected—and then, separately, I offer the fuller account. The autistic GLP info-dump. A cascade of reflection, theory, lived experience, and patterned association that always, always exceeds the word count. I write this way not to show off, but to survive. Because the only way I can enter these spaces is through language that feels like mine. That loops and constellates and returns to itself in spirals, not straight lines. I don’t do this for the instructors—I do it for myself. To make the material make sense. To insert myself into a narrative that was not written with people like me in mind.

But it raises a question I can’t ignore: what if we didn’t need to re-translate ourselves at all? What if our stories were central, not supplementary? What if the training of professionals began not with deficits, but with meaning? This is the vision of the Power Threat Meaning Framework—a radical departure from pathology-based models of distress. Instead of asking “what’s wrong with you?”, it asks, “what’s happened to you?”, “how did it make sense to survive that way?”, “what strengths have you used?” It shifts the frame entirely: from diagnosis to story, from disorder to adaptation, from shame to agency. It creates space for experiences like mine to be read not as dysfunction, but as signal. As resistance. As coherence in the face of incoherent systems.

And yet, I wonder—can such a framework truly flourish under capitalism? A system that thrives on standardisation, on categorising people into marketable needs and reimbursable services, has little use for narrative complexity. Capitalism demands legibility. It demands that we be fixed, diagnosed, serviceable. The PTMF is a threat not just to old models of therapy, but to the entire economy of mental health as it currently operates. And perhaps that’s why it’s missing from the syllabus. Not because it lacks value, but because it cannot be reconciled with the logics of the system these courses are designed to uphold.

So I continue. Translating. Overwriting. Carving space for stories like mine, even when the page offers no invitation. Because the stakes are not just about whether I feel seen in a classroom. They are about whether future professionals will ever be able to see us at all.

The Problem – Corporatised Credentialing, Capitalist Foundations

These continuing education units aren’t about transformation—they’re about survival. Some of the roles in elementary special education now require a certain number of early childhood development credits. So here I am. Not because I believe this coursework will prepare me to meet the complexity of autistic children in a collapsing system, but because the position requires it. I’m doing what the system asks so I can keep doing the work that matters. But let’s be honest: none of this—not the syllabus, not the frameworks, not the textbooks frozen in time—prepares anyone for what the far-right has in store for the country, for education, or for those of us who’ve always lived at the margins of both.

The Supreme Court’s decisions have made their strategy clear: dismantle public education, redirect public funds to private religious institutions, and call it freedom. It’s the judicial arm of a decades-long project to break the commons. The courts have been stacked to do this work. And they are doing it. We are watching, in real time, the slow-motion erasure of the free, secular, public school. And the CE units I’m taking—designed around compliance, credentialism, and out-of-date frameworks—do not name this moment. They do not equip teachers, and certainly not teachers like me, to recognise the scale of what’s coming. They are preparing us for yesterday’s problems whilst tomorrow’s crisis is already at the door.

What we are being trained for, whether intentionally or not, is to manage decline. To uphold a system that is already being gutted. To offer polite, data-driven interventions whilst the infrastructure burns around us. There’s nothing in these courses about what to do when your school becomes a holding space for the children that no charter school wants. Nothing about what to do when public funds vanish, your union protections erode, and your role as an educator becomes more about control than care. Nothing about what happens when your curriculum is dictated by politically sanctioned surveillance and fear. There is no preparation here for the moral violence of the regime that’s forming.

And so the frameworks we’re handed—about child development, about counselling, about best practice—feel like relics. Not because the ideas are inherently flawed, but because they exist in a vacuum. They presume a functioning public system. They presume the profession still exists in the form they’re describing. But we are entering something else now. And these frameworks cannot free us, because they were never built to. They cannot protect us, because they don’t name the threat. They cannot ready us, because they refuse to name the war that’s already being waged—on truth, on autonomy, on public goods, on disabled lives, on education itself.

So yes, I’ll do the work. I’ll meet the credit requirements. I’ll submit the assignments. But I do so with no illusion that this is preparation. It is paperwork. It is what we do when the path forward has been stripped for parts and we are trying to find a way through anyway. This isn’t professional development. It’s defensive survival in a field already under siege.

The Future – What Now?

The future we need cannot be reached by reform. It will not arrive through tweaks to curriculum, or marginally updated editions of textbooks still anchored in outdated paradigms. What’s needed is a dismantling—a deep and unapologetic reimagining of what education and public life could be if they were no longer tethered to corporate logic or colonial inheritance. And that reimagining must begin with an honest accounting of where we are, and how we got here.

We are not simply in a moment of crisis. We are in the latest stage of a strategy that predates us all—a long-game project launched well before Reagan ever took office. The far-right think tanks, Heritage among them, were already in place by the 1970s. They had the playbook ready. They just needed a corporate pitchman with a Hollywood smile and a folksy way of selling oligarchy as freedom. Reagan was their Gipper, but he wasn’t the author. The corporations that funded Heritage, and continue to fund its successors, had no intention of leaving their future to democratic whims. They knew that democracy—real democracy—might interfere with profits. So they rigged the game. The education reforms, the school vouchers, the “choice” rhetoric, the judicial appointments—they are all chapters in the same story.

But this story is older still. This land began as a corporation. The original colonies were extractive ventures, their profits sent back to the Crown, their lands seized, their labour enslaved. The beneficiaries have changed, but the game has not. It’s still about enclosure. Still about extraction. Still about making sure that public goods—land, health, learning, story—are either denied or sold back to us at a cost. What we are witnessing now, in the courts, in the curriculum, in the slow draining of the public school system, is simply the latest phase of a very old, very deadly project.

So what now? What would it look like to train professionals not to manage decline, but to resist it? Not to serve systems, but to subvert them? What if liberatory training became the norm—not as a boutique add-on, but as the foundation? Imagine courses co-designed by those most excluded: disabled activists, Black feminists, Indigenous thinkers, working-class organisers, neurodivergent knowledge-holders. Imagine if the core texts weren’t case studies written from the outside, but lived accounts that refused to be pathologised. Imagine training that taught students to identify harm not as personal failing, but as structural violence. That taught how to organise, not just how to intervene.

The Marxist canon has long illuminated the connections between economic systems and the shape of our inner lives. And we can look, too, to places like China and Vietnam—flawed, yes, but living examples of what it can mean to turn a nation’s resources toward collective benefit. But let’s be honest: the corporate lockout will never permit such a transformation here. The system is engineered to prevent it. Education, in the U.S., is not failing. It’s functioning exactly as designed. That’s the horror. And also the call.

Because in a Western world drifting toward full oligarchy, these questions—what we teach, who gets to speak, whose pain is made legible—are not academic. They are questions of survival. Of whose futures will be imagined, and whose will be erased. And those of us who see what’s happening—we have a duty. Not to comply, not to perform our professionalism for the sake of a dying order, but to gather, to remember, to rewrite. To refuse the lie that says this is the best we can do.

Wrapping Up …

I sit in these classrooms, day after day, and I know they cannot see me. The syllabus does not name me. The textbooks do not anticipate me. The assignments do not imagine someone like me as their reader. I am present, but not expected. I show up in a space that was never built to hold me, and I do the work anyway. Because I know what’s at stake—not just for me, but for those who will come after. But there is a toll. There is always a toll. What happens to a person who spends their life knowing there is no place for them? Not just socially, but structurally? What happens when every doorway into legitimacy requires that you leave some part of yourself behind?

You learn to rewrite.

You learn to read between the lines of the course material, to feel the silence where your experience should be. You answer the discussion questions with one voice and write your real truth in the margins. You learn to speak in code, then in commentary, then in refusal. You sit at the back of the room—not out of shame, but out of strategy—and with a pen in your hand, you begin to draft the future that the curriculum forgot to imagine. A future where autistic, trans, neurodivergent, disabled, poor, racialised lives are not exceptions to be accommodated but truths to be centred. A future where help means solidarity, not control. Where development is measured not by checklists, but by the flourishing of relational life. Where teaching and healing are not industries, but acts of shared liberation.

I don’t know if we’ll get there in time. I don’t know if the systems we live under will collapse before we’ve built something new. But I do know that this rewriting—quiet, stubborn, relentless—is how we begin. Because if there is no place for us in the present, then we will write ourselves into the future. Line by line. Lesson by lesson. Until one day, a student like me opens a book, finds their own reflection, and knows that someone was here before them, carving space. Making room. Refusing to disappear.

Final thoughts …

Writing these long articles is how I find the language required to move through the world as an adult—how I make sense of the professional scripts, the institutional forms, the hollow phrases that fill the spaces where care should be. It’s a kind of translation work—tedious, necessary, and often lonely. But poetry is what keeps me sane. It’s where the language gets to uncoil. Where I don’t have to explain, just witness. Where I can write not to be understood, but to remember that I am still here. Still watching. Still writing.

The Ones Who Saw the Door

They are preparing us for yesterday’s problems
whilst tomorrow’s crisis is already at the door.

I say it again,
though the sentence falls like broken circuitry
into a classroom that does not know what a door is
if it does not open into profit.

I was born in the ruins
of a story that had no name for me.
Raised in Los Angeles,
which is to say,
raised in prophecy.
Raised in the ashes of what they kept calling
a system.

I know this place.
The sidewalk’s memory.
The whine of air units in August.
The uncollected trash.
The way the sky looks when a city
forgets to breathe.

They are preparing
data dashboards
and developmentally appropriate benchmarks
and screening tools for a future
already devoured by its shareholders.

They have no language
for a child who speaks in soundscapes,
for a body that maps its own weather,
for a mind that weaves memory in metaphor
and offers it as gift
not commodity.

They tell us
to get credentials
while the court hands over the public school
to God and Chevron.

They tell us
to learn play-based assessment
while the soil dries and the water is bought.

They tell us
it will be okay.
That the frameworks are robust.
That the standards are research-based.
That they’ve accounted for variability
within acceptable limits.

But I am not within limits.
I am not your standard deviation.
I am older than your norms.

I am the pattern breaker.
The data glitch.
The walker between fires.

I have seen what comes
when you teach children
how to comply with extinction.

I have wandered
longer than the curriculum.
I have held the future in my teeth
and refused to chew.

There was a time
before the game.
Before the land had shareholders.
Before the school bell marked
the start of the enclosure.

And there will be
a time after.
Though it will not be safe.
Though it will not be clean.
Though it will not be yours.

The children will still hum.
The ones you never noticed.
The ones you tried to fix.
They will build something
with the remnants you left.

We are not the crisis.
We are the memory
of what came before it.
We are the ones who saw the door.
And knew to stay
very
very
still.