School provided me with two goods: diversity and filtering. There I met liars, athletes, brainiacs, idiots, philosophers and bigots, poor losers and good Samaritans, bullies and sycophants. All of that diversity created an environment in which I learned how to filter and make judgments. I would have learned without school. But I’m pretty sure I would have wasted more time at it than I lost in classrooms.

As I have already confessed, I was a disruptive student. In junior high, when they graded us in scholarship and citizenship, I scored straight As in subjects and never above a C in attitude. I was the only girl regularly removed from classrooms. I spent time with other disruptors. And most of those boys did not do well at school.

I encountered one of those bad boys in my mid-40s and had a relationship with him for a few years. Richard was very intelligent, not bad looking, purportedly adult, and remarkably childish in his attitudes toward school and petty rules. The man could fascinate when he spoke about geology or astronomy; the boy would frustrate when he carped about the evils of school or tried to teach his sons to jaywalk or stick their used gum under a diner table. He was hyperactive and impulsive, never played team sports, excelled at bridge and ping pong, and was the cockiest poorest winner I’ve ever known. He’d been in and out of cults all his adult life. He was an acolyte looking for a guru.

After we stopped associating with one another he became clearer to me. His peculiarities made sense if I just viewed him as 14 instead of 44. He had this boyish way of showing off for me. He was an ace at baiting and teasing. I think of him now and “nyah nyah” rings in my head, even though he never said that.

Nowadays he’d be diagnosed with some personality disorder. At the least he’d be situated on the autistic spectrum. Even he knows he has attention deficit disorder, although I’ve heard him say there’s really no “disorder” to it. He asked the folks at Kaiser and they said, “yes, you have it, but you’re functioning fine, so you don’t need to be treated.” (No he wasn’t functioning fine; he deliberately limited appointments lest he forget to go to them, and he prophylactically arranged to have his work managed by another so he didn’t have to deal with clients.) They told him there were some ADHD support groups but they weren’t too successful because the members kept forgetting to attend the meetings (I’m not making this up).

Richard had a stint in the Army when he was 20. He interrupted college and served for a couple of years. He never left the base. He didn’t see combat. He didn’t advance. The only thing he told me about the experience was this: the Army is where he first encountered people of average intelligence. Richard was raised by a university professor and an educated mother; he’d never till then associated with IQs around 100. He said it was astounding. He reported spending time with guys who couldn’t reason, or solve problems. These men were friendly though. Richard liked them.

The rest of us met average-intelligence people in school. Even if a student took college-prep classes, there was always PE and Social Living. There was always more diversity in school than anywhere else.

I think Richard had a disability that public education didn’t accommodate. I know he was transferred to a private school when he was 14, and things improved. I look at the trajectory of his life since then and see no movement. It’s like he got stuck there, in the place where school worked briefly, and his subsequent experience was etched by adolescent attitude and an enduring contempt for regular school. I understand that he never flourished. I disagree that it was school’s fault.