I once got sued by an asshole client. He claimed that I damaged him, but that was because he was nabbed in a crooked financial transaction and wanted someone, anyone but him, to pay for it. Swear to God: he accused me of getting him into precisely the deal I advised him to avoid. His argument was that my recommendation was not effective; if it had been, he would have followed it.

He sued me and also the two jerks who sold him on the transaction. They were slimy. They didn’t have insurance. They didn’t know any good lawyers. In taking care of myself, I was forced to take care of them.

It was satisfying to get the case dismissed (with prejudice, and that’s when I found out how lovely the word “prejudice” can be), but it was yucky to have to rescue the bad guys. There was karmic justice later – both slimewads went bankrupt and otherwise failed, and the plaintiff ended up serving time for defrauding Delta Dental – but it was quite a lesson for me to learn that sometimes one is forced into an alliance, defensive probably, with an enemy.

In similar fashion, I lately find myself attempting to defend our school system. More than once in my history, and recently from my own niece, I’ve associated with an individual who so despises and disdains school that I feel compelled to speak up for it.

Sure school is fucked, but that doesn’t mean we should fuck school. Instead we need to desanctify it, like we should the military (thanks for your service), the institution of marriage, commercial Christmas. Let’s look at it clearly, and fix it.

The word comes from the Greek “sko-lay,” which means “leisure.” Of course: no one has time to go to school if life demands labor instead. The very idea of school is civilized, and requires that priorities be ordered to create time for students to learn. School is considered a basic right in this country, but it is categorically a privilege. It should be good.

Free education is supposed to create a learned electorate. The idea makes perfect sense; isn’t it time we tried to achieve it?

For the observable fact is that school as it has existed in my lifetime, on the East and West coasts of the USA, hasn’t worked. Those few of us who acquired education did it in spite of the boredom, silliness, and standardization of those long days, weeks, months, in classrooms.

Sure I’ve read the essays by the anti-schoolists. Yes I know American education was modeled on the Prussian approach, to create compliant conformists. But I also understand the bell curve; there isn’t a system even conceivable that would produce a population of extraordinary individuals. The simple fact is that school – good or bad – isn’t all that powerful. It can’t begin to compete with the influence of peers.

I don’t think you could have had it better, with regard to public school, than I did. The years were 1955 to 1967, and the places were Long Island, the San Diego area, and finally Marin County. I was bright and disruptive; I received special attention at both ends of the teaching spectrum. I skipped from third grade to fourth in early 1959, so I was separately tested then and also in seventh grade, when skipping was again proposed but my parents vetoed it.

I took all the fast-track classes. I obeyed my father and stuck with math and science even after I’d fulfilled the requirements for graduation. I sailed straight into Cal with honors. And I was so often bored.

I was always eager to get back to school in the fall. The summer was long and aimless, and its freedom from deadlines and schoolwork paled before the middle of July. But I grew exasperated at how dull school was, by November.

By and large the teachers were mediocre. Several times they were mean and jealous to the extent of being evil. I was inspired by my second grade teacher, the jewel I enjoyed for fifth grade, one social studies instructor in junior high, and a pair of high school teachers (math and history) who together would make an excellent man. But that’s it. Four or five brilliants in a field of about seventy.

Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In the same way that my mother’s insistence on a too-early bedtime inspired me to develop sleep “scripts” that I use even now, to put me under when that’s preferable to staying awake, so the boredom of school encouraged me to find ways to self-stimulate. There’s no question that public school is a Darwinian experience; the stronger survive to the next class, and the survival game in turn hones strength.

No, I didn’t hate school. It wasn’t powerful enough to hate, or painful enough to provoke. But every now and then I consider returning to study something, and I just can’t go there. My negative response feels visceral. I got through it. I’ll never go back.