"We should teach our students to sleep the same way we teach them to read."

They stand there, their eyes half-closed, their foreheads pressed against the table, as if defeated by an invisible battle. In the silence of the classroom, one senses a heavy fatigue, not just physical: a fatigue of living in a world that mistreats them from the moment they wake up.

Sleep, in our society fueled by urgency and suffocated by screens, has become a luxury. It has also become political. To sleep today is to disobey the demands of performance, consumption, and constant connection. For my students, it's sometimes a losing battle. Because we must understand what it means to live in a world where we have no silence, no room of our own, no respected rhythm, and no structuring family model.

Sleep isn't an option. It's a condition of survival, as vital as eating or breathing. The brain, that organ that school demands every moment, cannot function without restorative sleep. Memory, concentration, emotions, the ability to reason, and even to dream of another life—all of this collapses if the night has been replaced by TikTok, anxiety, or the cold glow of a screen staying up later than parents.

Studies have proven that chronically sleeping less than six hours a night is like living with the slowed intelligence of a drunk. And yet, we allow this deprivation to take hold, like a silent inevitability, in working-class neighborhoods, among the children of exiles, and among the invisible young people that schools are trying to save.

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