A boy from my street became interested in owls. He discovered a new species or a new behavior in old species. He got into clubs and scientific correspondence and got invited to South Africa to discuss his findings. A 16-year-old traveled to another hemisphere, all expenses paid, to talk about birds, while the rest of us smoked by the monkey bars and called each other f**kface.
One teacher later claimed he introduced him to owls and made him like them: “Look, a creature with funny squinty eyes, go read about it. We absolutely need this huge building full of ex-Communist informants to spark your interest. Otherwise you might to go to the woods and see one for yourself.”
Most people are autodidacts, and those who really aren’t don’t need to go to school. Every semi-cognizant entity has enough motivation to learn to read and write because he wants to send a text to Susie to come round and around to his proposal to do the lambada. If that doesn’t make him, no school ever will.
Nobody showed me how to clean a toilet. I never saw a video, never read a manual. And yet, when I was tasked with maintenance of the porcelain bowl, I used all my physical and mental ability to make it happen. If some dried pieces wouldn’t let go with any brush or tissue, I used my fingernail. I prevailed. And they weren’t my pieces, I rarely stick.
There is nothing you couldn’t teach yourself or someone couldn’t show you on the job. And make something new and better. Did they teach you in school to make cheesecake ice cream, a bot farm, or a collateral debt obligation? No, they only prepared you for the interview: “Hello, nice to meet you, this is the paper that confirms I had patience to sit at a desk and do what I’m told for 15 years. Which proves I can do it for 50 more.”
The socialization is overrated, children are just as nasty as adults, and when there are too many of them in one place, some cannot absorb or deflect the ridicule and humiliation. That’s why we have unannounced marksmanship practice sessions with burst fire mode. The children who perpetrate them are, of course, wrong. You remember the bastards and take them out one by one 10 years later when there’s no connection among them.
We told the children to stop it, but they wouldn’t listen. We tried to abolish guns, but everybody threatened to use them if it were to happen. Most probably in a school to prove their point. So how do we save human lives, the most valuable thing in the universe? We abolish schools. Yes, the entire civilization would collapse the next day, there would be nothing but hordes of illiterate zombies running around everywhere. You know… like now.
All my college schoolmates worked as busboys in richer countries for a year, then spent all their money on a 3-kilo Toshiba laptop. It was *the* Slovak bandwagon of the early 2000s. Then they climbed the corporate ladder with adulation, machination, and outliving employee turnover (promoted just because they stayed). Some had an entrepreneurial gene and college was an outright obstruction for them. Nobody’s life would have been different and it would have started 5 years earlier.
Yes, some do what they studied, like lawyers who are trained to say their client caught on three cameras and apprehended soaked in victim’s blood is innocent, the opposition will destroy the country, and the minister’s cobbler grandfather loaned him the money to buy the 12-million-euro compound in Marbella.
And most medical students become doctors. They sacrifice their lives to save ours, and spend their time in smelly bluey buildings, so that we can go extreme ironing. Or eat an egg. I’m jealous of doctors, but I wouldn’t practice medicine, I would only use it to get laid. I would resent helping fainters on airplanes and in theaters, but I’d help. Then get a phone number from a cute witness.
I don’t know if TARTY SMARTY liked school, we met in the third year of college. She studied, was nervous before an exam, and despondent if she didn’t pass. But she would pick herself up quickly with a new dalliance.