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 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.”
School is prison. It holds children so parents can go to work. The after-school programs are there so parents can have sex, if they didn’t have it at work already. The whole system is enacted to perpetuate capitalism and consumerism. The education is entirely incidental. And just like in prisons and workplaces, school is one relentless dick-measuring. But while adults can hold the hatred in and get cancer from it, children don’t have that ability yet, and so they bring out the big guns. Guns.
And so I say, let us save the children! And 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.
That’s why students have to put their phones in a locker before class, it’s an attention competition for the inferior lectures. Do something that makes them raise their eyes from the screen. Make math so compelling, it interests them more than boobs and boners. You piece of teach!
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 hold press conferences and say: “The government is destroying the country, the opposition will destroy the country, my cobbler grandfather loaned me the money to buy the 12-million-euro compound in Marbella, my client wasn’t at the crime scene, that’s not him smiling into the security camera, and the weapon the prosecution presented, that’s not the one he used. I’m upfront with every woman I’m not looking for anything serious.”
Everybody can read all the laws and find ways around them on their own. If the professors knew all the loopholes, they would be in the private sector already.
And most medical students become doctors. They sacrifice their lives to save ours and spend their time in smelly bluey buildings so the rest of us can eat eggs. And again, many people never read a single letter from a medicine book and successfully treated patients, even performed surgery because there was nobody around. Many others forged their diplomas and worked as doctors for decades. Many do right now and will never be exposed. Many licensed doctors kill people, deliberately or through negligence. The degree is all make-believe to keep patients and their relatives calm. After Reagan was shot and brought to the hospital, he didn’t say: “I hope you’re all real doctors.”
I’m jealous of doctors, but I wouldn’t practice medicine, I would use it for getting laid only. I would resent helping fainters on airplanes and in theaters, but I’d help. Then get a phone number from a cute witness.
Okay, let doctors go to school, how much more harm can they do? But for the jobs TARTY SMARTY had, she needn’t even have finished high school. She was naturally bright and gifted, more than capable of doing the work she did, and for a while she may have made more money than I did. Like when I was unemployed. But she gladly went to college for the camaraderie, and she had to meet one hopeless daydreamer from Bardejov.