Honestly, I don’t know how common or uncommon it is elsewhere. It’s just something that’s never made sense to me and the explanation is always a circular, “we don’t have the funding.” Okay, so rebudget. Get more funding. Tell us who’s gatekeeping giving pencils to schoolchildren so we can get give them a fucking swirly. That’s not an answer on it own.

I would have done myself a lot less psychological damage during childhood if I’d understood earlier that, in cases like these, my autism is actually correct. It’s not that I have some deficit in understanding why these things are happening. It’s baseless convention and ritual all the way down.