The Rebellious Educator: My Breakthrough Story
Before I was the girl who couldn’t bear sitting in a high school classroom. Not because I was unruly, but because I could feel the life draining out of me while teachers recited lessons that meant nothing. I asked questions no one wanted to answer and was labelled non-compliant and told I was “wasting my potential.” I was bored, unchallenged, restless, hungry for something real. So I skipped classes to make music and art with the other creative rebels, or hid in the trees to question the world and swap intuitive downloads with friends who, like me, sensed there had to be more. Needless to say, I failed high school, not from lack of intelligence, but from an inability to pretend it made sense. Deep down, I knew the system wasn’t built for curiosity or expansion. It was built for obedience and control. I just didn’t yet know why. Crisis That quiet knowing never left me. It burned inside... a need to make education make sense. Decades later, as a respected school principal, I found myself facing the same machine from the inside. The spark that began in that teenage classroom met its wildfire in 2021. When covid mandates arrived, I refused to surrender my sovereignty for safety theatre. I kept hoping reason would return... that someone, somewhere, would wake up and realise none of it made sense. But the time to comply ran out and the punishment was swift: credentials stripped, locked out of my own school, packing my office at night, forbidden to say goodbye to the teachers, parents, and children I’d devoted my life to. It was the same lesson all over again: obey, or be exiled. Chase For thirty years I’d fought to make education human again... teaching teachers how to lead real learning, leading communities with trust and sovereignty, speaking on world stages about visionary leadership and learner sovereignty. I believed I could change the system from within. But when it finally cast me out, I realised it was never built to be changed. It was built to keep us small, compliant, trapped inside the matrix... by design.