On an early morning in 2003, Bonnie Bennett-Walker found herself in an event hall for a company meeting staring at a projected image of a bull, and next to the bull, a pile of…bull excrement. Now, you’ve likely already guessed what those two images represent. However, looking around the hall, Bonnie realized nobody else was analyzing the two images. Everyone sat in their folding chairs, eyes cast upon the images, waiting. Even when someone came out and directly asked everyone to interpret the image, not a single hand was raised. Perhaps they were too embarrassed, yes, but perhaps they truly didn’t know. 

That was the moment that Bonnie realized she didn’t want to be there; didn’t want to be like them. She wanted—no, needed to get out of the event hall, with its looming ceilings, monolithic doors, and the underlying feeling of isolation despite being full of hundreds of people. She couldn’t stay there, surrounded by people who had already given in to the capitalist machine. She couldn’t go back to work either, stuck in a cubicle for eight hours, deprived of sunlight and genuine human interaction. She needed to go back to where people thought for themselves: college. 

Before her publishing job, Bonnie was actually already in college. She left because she didn’t feel connected, and didn’t know what she wanted to say. In the period between leaving college and going back, she “had lots of weird and freaky” jobs. But she didn’t view this chain of events as a bad thing. During this time she learned how the world worked and how people think. When she went back to college, she had found exactly what she wanted to say. 

Back in college, she finished her BA, applied to the SF State Master’s program, and after graduating, chose to be a college professor. She followed that path for almost a decade, until she left due to the horrendous pay. 

Now, Bonnie Bennett-Walker is a public high school teacher. She successfully managed to get away from the trap of a corporate career. And encourages what she views as the opposite of corporate capitalism in her curriculum: independent thinking. She grew up being encouraged to think for herself by her mother, and attributes much of who she is to that. “I feel very lucky and grateful for that,” she says. 

Bonnie is a major proponent of public education. One of the most important parts of it for her is teaching people to think for themselves. For her, knowing how to think independently influenced how she sees society and the systems within. She believes that everyone needs and deserves that perspective as well. She states “Without public education, we have no democracy.”