Sputterpub's Blog

Then there’s my niece. She did fine in school. Oh there were behavior problems (she didn’t fall far from the family tree), but she attended the required counseling and she had understanding and support through it all at home. She excelled in solid subjects. She acquired science, math, literature, Latin. And when she told my sister she was done mid-way through her junior year of high school, we worked to get her out of the place a year early (only the PE requirement presented a challenge, and everyone knows a doctor who will write a note). She went to college a month before her 17th birthday. She completed her bachelor’s degree.

So how’d she become such a vehement school-hater? Why is Fuck School her mantra? Why is homeschooling her decision? She’s a fully actuated grownup, living the life she chose and working the career she loves, well-educated and capable of independent research. She says she is keeping her kids away from school so “they can become the remarkable people they are.” A situation she achieved while attending public school. What makes her think school is so powerful that it can stop her children?

And then I look at the men she has chosen. From the moment puberty set it, my niece has had a boyfriend. She just trotted up to whomever she fancied, said “I like you,” and it was a done deal (we once compared notes and I admitted I had never asked a guy out, and she replied that it was the opposite for her – she’d never been asked out).

I review the males she left behind and also her spouse, the father of her kids, the love of her life and her partner in everything, and I realize they are all wounded birds.

One was self-consciously scrawny. Another was bookish and embarrassed about his looks. A third had a learning disability and a prime motivation to conceal it. Others managed to weld ignorance onto arrogance and go to battle against phantoms. All avoided classrooms and waged war on homework. All have selected small communities and narrow agendas.

Sure they were creative and eccentric. But they were also weak. Like so many of the boys I knew and cared for in the old detention rooms. School didn’t serve them well, but they lacked the capacity to make it work anyway. They tucked their chins down and hunched away as if blows were falling on them, and they flirted, floated, and fantasized vengeful dreams.

It strikes me that my niece’s scholophobia is like Gulliver’s misanthropy: learned instead of experienced. Objective. She hates school on behalf of those she has loved. It’s similar to the way I have hated the mothers of my best friends. I sure couldn’t place the hate on my pals…

Looking in this direction, I see they were all sexually retarded. They still giggle at penis jokes. They love comic books and trading cards. Their worlds are populated with heroes and villains and their ambitions are epic but amorphous. Their lawbreaking is trivial.

Funny, but through today’s scope what I see is a small collection of individuals, developmentally stuck in early adolescence. Richard landing in private school and my niece experiencing my sister’s second divorce (we didn’t imagine then that losing a loathed stepdad would have such an adverse effect, but we wonder now). The school-haters all become comprehensible if I forget how long they have lived and view them as incipient teens. Contemplating sex while they hurl spitballs. Assembling little platoons as they stomp on textbooks. I understand a person can get stuck just about anywhere on the time line.

I can fix school. It’s obvious and easy. People love to sing and dance; teach song and dance at school and you’ll cover music and physical education. Let the students play at recess. And folks of all ages love stories: use narrative to teach. The school day is too long and the school year is agricultural. Stop that! Make school year-round, but give several weeks off and let the day be no longer than four hours. Have older kids teach the younger ones; that’s so natural it’s completely crazy that it isn’t done always and everywhere.

I can fix school but I can’t repair my niece and I never had a beneficial effect on Richard.

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.

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.