hey there demons! it’s me, ya boi

from the start, percy’s relationship with school–whether that be public or private–is a central theme of the novels. in the first chapter of the entire series, he’s quite up front about how he cannot function within the current school system:

“I had to try harder, even if this was my sixth school in six years and I was probably going to be kicked out again.”

and this is no accident!! especially knowing that rick riordan, prior to writing percy jackson, was a public school teacher. to know that he watched his own child struggle within this system, and wrote the books as a response to a system which made his son’s learning disabilities so extremely difficult to manage. that he then, in his books, invented a world in which rather than being framed as something detrimental, adhd and dyslexia are framed as beneficial. rather than being something that must be fixed by the system, they are something to be celebrated, even admired.

there’s one scene that always sticks out in my memory from the battle of the labyrinth as one of the scenes where i’ve always felt that riordan essentially gives up any pretense of metaphor and speaks directly to the reader: the scene with annabeth and the sphinx. (for context, annabeth is asked repeatedly to mark her answer down on a paper so it can be read by a machine, and the sphinx asks her various trivia facts)

“These aren’t riddles,” Annabeth said.

“What do you mean?” the sphinx snapped. “Of course they are. This test material is specially designed—”

“It’s just a bunch of dumb, random facts,” Annabeth insisted. “Riddles are supposed to make you think.”

“Think?” The Sphinx frowned. “How am I supposed to test whether you can think? That’s ridiculous! Now, how much force is required—”

“Stop!” Annabeth insisted. “This is a stupid test.”

i think it’s pretty obvious the point that he’s making in this scene! that standardized testing forces us to simply memorize facts rather than critically think, that teaching to a test is not teaching people how to learn, and that simply forcing people to accumulate a certain number of “correct” answers does little to actually help our students. and furthermore, that even students like annabeth, who can technically memorize the answers and do well on this test, are still being left behind because they aren’t being taught how to think. and others, who might not be able to perform within this standardized method, will be left behind.

but we can even draw this theme out farther within the novels. the gods themselves in a way serve as a broader metaphor for this broken system as well. the intensely stratified and codified system of the gods, along the refusal to recognize huge swaths of children who don’t fit into the prescribed hierarchy, seems a near perfect allegory to a lot of how much of the public school system functions. in a sense, you could make the argument that the various gods function as school subjects, as boxes to be put into, as particular talents that must be cultivated, and thus divided. it is only when they all finally come together that victory can be achieved. whether that victory is, in the literal sense of the novels, winning a war, or in a more metaphorical sense, critical thought, interdisciplinary learning, and teaching in a way that actually serves the various needs and backgrounds of all students.

the whole arc of the percy jackson series is about inclusion. it’s about disillusionment with a system that forces only a small number of people into particular boxes where they superficially appear to fit, and which leaves the rest behind. in the end, it’s about forcing the system to not only acknowledge, but to actively serve those it now tries to forget about.