I shouldn't have started on about the children last week. I should have known myself well enough to know no good could come of it.

So here I am, at no-good. If I start talking about children, no matter what age, I want to talk about school.

Or Halloween costumes. But that is a very niche thing and so short-lived.

Really, I just want to talk about school.

I was that aunt before I was genuinely old enough to be that aunt. And now that I am at a suitable boring, schoolmarmish tantie age (as opposed to fun tantie, liming tantie, baking tantie, drag-racing tantie) I am, to no one's surprise but my own, still her. Sad, sad for me.

About the children. Things are bad. I know this because I have met many. I may not have met yours, but I may have met similar ones. Things are bad with the children because of school. School is terrible, and has been for as long as I've known it.

It also seems to be getting worse.

You may read this and think it doesn't apply to you because your young ones are bringing home the kind of report cards you want to turn into wallpaper. I worry about you and them most.

Here's what I see: no one is helping them to understand what they are studying. They are learning by memorising, inhaling, repeating and just plain bluffing. Or through osmosis. Something must take if you use past papers like a sort of mental jump rope - over and over and over - even in the blur, the student will absorb something.

I blame my sisters. They went out and spawned. Said spawn grew into pickney who went to school. And so, at a tender age, I was forced into the workhouse that is sibling-obligation.

How tender could this age have possibly been, you ask? My eldest nephew is five years younger than I. (My family is big, with big age differences. We're like a living Marquez novel. No child marriages were involved.)

I was really young when I started getting angry about what and how the kids were being taught. It took me at least three children to understand what I was railing against.

I was fighting a system that told them what to do and how to. Not why, not where it came from, not different ways to get to it. It did not teach them to question what was taught, and, most of all, it really did not teach them to read.

But of course they can read. Sure.

Can they, though? For that matter, can you?

I'm happy they can differentiate between a stop sign and a coconut cart, but reading is so much bigger. And the more world they have to encounter, the more essential it becomes.

Here's the deal: comprehension. This is where we went wrong from the get-go.

Someone picked up the idea of understanding text by doing a close reading, parsing it, combing it for clues as to the author's intentions, the connections between events, all of it - you know, you did it at school. They called this 'comprehension,' put it in a box, put that box into something called 'English language,' and locked it away.

And there comprehension was exiled ever after. If we look, we can still see it in unimaginative curricula.

I'm 100 pe