Against High School

It's a small miracle that I graduated from high school.

Most people think I'm kidding when I mention that I almost failed my junior year. You end up in an Ivy PhD program, and people suspect that you've been groomed for it since the womb.  Not me, at least.

After my mother remarried, I had a pretty tough time getting by.  I would stay out late, get up early - anything to avoid being at home with her and my stepfather. Luckily I didn't do anything too crazy, but it wasn't the healthiest moment in my life.

I didn't do very much work. I could get by in most classes just by showing up and absorbing information, or looking at a book for five minutes before class.

For better or worse, high school isn't the hardest thing in the world, at least academically.

But I refused to do math homework all together, and this angered my teacher.  She basically decided I would fail as punishment for my obstinance.  (I realize now how much of a punk I was being...)  But still, it's never good pedagogy to set a kid up for failure, however much of a punk he or she may be.  So it goes.

In any case, I got failure notices.  Multiple failure notices -- these terrible half-page, NCR paper forms with canary, pink, goldenrod and white layers. I have no idea why. I usually just took my copies and threw them away.  More punkishness, woops.

Once I turned 18, in November of my senior year, I moved out and things got a little better - sort of.  Living on less than $900 a month in Social Security Survivors Benefits makes for a tight budget, even in 1998.

All of which is to say: I'm not sure high school does what it's supposed to do, even if it's just supposed to discipline us into being able to sit quietly for hours at a time and follow painfully dumb instructions.

Who thinks it's a good idea to put hundreds of hormonally charged kids in a crowded place and teach them grammar and calculus and Spanish and whatnot?  With no intensive focus on how to be a human being, on health and wellness, exercise and eating?

Thirteen year-olds need therapy and exhausting hiking trips and urban scavenger hunts, not Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Left to their own devices, which is what we do, young kids do incredibly dumb, dangerous and damaging things.  If we're lucky, they smoke pot and have some risky sex.  If not, they're pregnant, addicted to god knows what and destined for a rather terrible life as a burden to society.

Can we have a serious conversation about education reform?

Always cost—but how much does it cost to take kids and make them do some team-building manual labor, maybe shovel snow for old people -- keep the sidewalks safe and clear -- or to write up old people's stories, to learn about their struggles, to make art and find means for creative expression.

I can make that happen pretty cheaply.  How many art history grads work at Starbucks?

Oh, the unions.  Sorry, but I have some big problems with teachers unions.  That's another post.  I know they do good things, promoted teaching as a profession and advanced the standing of women in society. But they also really, really screw up a lot of important and necessary work.

In any case.  Thank you Kelly P and Lise R -- and the ladies in the office and the janitors. Wouldn't have made it without you.