Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 10 student in Ballina, New South Wales, Australia.
For most of Year 8, I genuinely believed that if you were kind to people, they would be kind back, and that fairness was something that could be expected from the world in the ordinary course of events. It was a belief I held as fact rather than opinion, which is the most dangerous way to hold a belief. What made it fragile was that I had never been seriously tested. The thing that tested it was a situation I am not going to describe in detail, because the detail is not the point. What matters is that I was treated in a way that was not fair, and that I had done nothing to cause it, and that the people who should have noticed did not, or did not think it was worth acting on. I felt the injustice the way you feel physical pain — not as an idea but as a bodily fact. It surprised me by how surprised I was. What I came to understand — slowly, and not gracefully — is that fairness is not a feature of the world but an aspiration that some people and institutions try to honour, and that the gap between the aspiration and the reality is the normal condition, not an exception. This was not a comfortable thing to understand. It took me a while to decide what to do with it. The version of me that existed before understood fairness as a given. The version that exists now understands it as something that has to be maintained by effort, and that is not guaranteed by good intentions alone. That shift changed how I act: I am now more likely to say something when I see something unfair happen to someone else, not because I am especially brave, but because I know from experience what it is like to be the person in the room who needed someone to say something and no one did. What I am still working out is whether the experience made me more realistic or simply more cynical, and whether those two things are different in the ways I want them to be.