Abhorance of School



 Maroochydore High School , Queensland , Australia
 
 
   I don't believe pressing my view of cultural expression into my kid's
life will be constructive in the long run. I am part of a very small outcast
subculture and I think such a lifestyle compromise has to be entirely from
his initiative, if he is to establish himself likewise without regrets. So
far, in stores and government offices his presense with me has been a huge
boon, both for my equilibrium and the sensibilites of those who see us
there. The magic has failed in school situations. The school spell always
cuts us apart right away. I think this is because of my failure to find a
place in autocratic choreography. I have a complete abhorance of the
organized disrespect that so many people assume to be proper in relating to
children or to authorities.
   The play of regular America is fine with my kid. He is fine with
calculated disrespect, against him or anyone, as long as he has a clear
openning to present likewise. He is encouraged in this by both his parents,
both of the local couples whose kids he plays with, the principal of the
school he goes to, and many of the other kids. Like the grownups, he overtly
spurns any focus on preventing the misplacing of a toy or figuring out how
to clean something or budgeting of resources or study of interpersonal
impact with familiar people or genuine constructive study of anything.
   His focus, and theirs, appears to me to be on making a politically
significant presentation of themselves, which most of them refer to as
being cool. While they all seem to prefer a show of significance that arises
from something actual, the need for a quick presentation generally prohibits
the use of planned achievement or any matter that requires a lot of
explanation. Though in general he and his mentors prefer constructive and
friendly significance, references to violence, heartless remarks or actual
minor random attacks, seem to be very popular and successful also at
establishing emotionally fulfilling and validated significance.
   He and the others have no apparent issue with the resulting deranged
defensiveness and paranoia. Hazards requiring genuine attention to detail,
such as encounters with random insects or unregulated gymnastics, or related
to being unique in a way that could be belittled, become subjects for
serious beligerence. The shared environment has to kept absurdly sterile
and as featureless as possible. Any unplanned element of any kind has to be
brutally eliminated, as in making the floor of a hockey rink, so as to
simplify regulation of the normal heartless psychic brawl.
   His and their lives look like an orgy of ridiculous pride to me,
posturing endlessly for no real purpose and continually looking for
opportunities to legitimately hurt someone else's feelings. I am completely
at a loss to participate. They all abhor the snakes and insects of my
unmowed yard. My prolific raw materials inspire no helpful inventions, only
derision or abusive pillaging in search of potential weapons. Writings
such as this are just a tedious bore to all of them. Their interest in
words appears to be restricted to sound bites and obscure pompous
platitudes that mean nothing to me and maybe nothing to any of them.
   His school system makes a flamboyant pretense of intent to offer help in
learning technically useful skills and information, but through a format of
humiliating and tedious lectures, schoolwork that involves no establishment
of real value of any kind, and a social context that continually threatens
hurt feelings.
   Fear of hurt feelings rules my memories of school more than anything
else. I hid from the problem, at the time, by devouring the teaching
materials. I did not socially mature to speak of and almost none of the
data I learned assisted in my adult life in any way. I was distracted, an
ostrich with head in the sand, staying entertained or busy to maintain
emotional balance.
   Nevertheless, as a child I believed in the sanity and constructive
intent of school, knowing no other culture. Both my parents got college
degrees so I assumed I was college bound. I gave up on formal education
after a very thorough trial with some very creative and wealthy schools. I
dropped out after three and half terms in college. I got a vasectomy, moved
out of my rented room into a backpack and put my savings account into
traveler's checks.
   Thus, a bit late in life, I commenced genuine constructive study of the
culture around me. I studied my relations with the work world, my relations
with women, the pursuit of pride and nobility, the real nature of live
controversy, the development and maintanence of machinery, and most of all
the final facing and handling of various kinds of paranoia. Later I studied
building construction and maintanence in order to obtain a house.
   Polite social involvement of all sorts faded further and further into
the past. My failure to cope with physical and social competition, my being
a poor sport, and my abhorance of being artificially busy remain
unaddressed even today. I have some skill with group sports but the actual
activity horrifies me. I could probably fight physically or verbally
reasonably well but I've never tried it, even in fantasy. In my youth I
mastered chess, until faced in high school with a stone wall of serious
chess playing, devoid of complex emotion or what I could call constructive
intent.
   In a recent tour of a modern alternative school I could not identify any
constructive intent on the part of the teachers, the principal or the
institution as a whole. The description of normal daily activity and of
normal limits to expression in the school struck me as a horrible
straight-jacket of fear, with an apparent intent of training the children to
adapt to living that way permanently, hysterically and obsessively creative
in some very narrow and tightly defined fields of possibility. The tour was
a scary lonely experience for me, with actually being in class promising to
be exponentially more suffocating. I was invited to volunteer and offer my
heart and imagination to the situation there. The staff seemed totally
good-hearted but unconsciously evil at the same time.
   I see them as training gladiators for the kind of social arena of psyhic
hard ball that I can't even handle reading about in the paper. Their
admiration and belief in the nobility of brutal social competition seems
quite genuine. They guilelessly brag about each other's successes; and
about the relentless pressure they put on the children to practice
skills useful for symbolic competition. The teachers described being
mandated by district policy, local law and social convention. I don't doubt
them and I've often seen spontaneous symbolic competition at a jobsite
diffusing potentially nasty tension.
   But I see deliberate training and preparation for symbolic competition
as a totally different kind of human sharing, contributing to big scale
political strife and to failure at easy-going intimacy, especially for
emotionally immature people, notably a weakness of most men.
   For example, a gaily colored sign in a hallway display declared the
school to be a racism free zone. In my town the regarding of racial fidelity
as an essential background for astonishing cultural elegance is mostly
unheard of and grossly politically incorrect, though the town is virtually
all european origin white people. The school's presentation of political
conflict as a story involving narrow-mindedness, unnecessary predation or
bigotry seems incorrect to me, and a force inspiring nearly everyone to
perceive that those kinds of political conflict actually occur.
   As a child I believed it too and watched that belief create insane
estrangement between people who were actually in virtually complete
agreement. The textbook forms of political conflict have never occurred in
my presense in 50 years of life; real political conflict has involved such
high costs of every sort that only deeply felt spiritual conviction or
genuine psychotic panic can motivate it. The mice in my house may look at me
as evil but I see the story as more complex than that. I also see the school
environment as fostering narrow-minded, randomly predatory and bigoted
discussion about such things; toothless in the school but poisonous socially
in the long run through thus inspiring a neurotic level of privacy and
censoring of interesting people.
   The teachers also harshly and proudly prohibit the practice of skills
such as learning how to fall without getting hurt, communicating present
experience to a crowd using musical devices, jimmying a locked door, doing
secret art or expository writing for self study, or doing unplanned food
preparation. Likewise I perceive the institutional setting compelling this,
due to insurance liability, maintanence efficiency or parental majority
sentiment. Thus the teachers keep all matters of actual importance, and
thus education that I can value, out of school.
   One neighbor couple, and an adult writer in a newsletter for a summerhill
style school, replace the pressure to compete using arbitrary
sophistication with pressure to stay inebriated by what they call play or
having fun. I'm even more abhorant of this approach, due to the denial of
constructive value and thus unintended promotion of criminal and abusive
activity that I attribute to it, particularly in a competitive or mexican
standoff social environment like the school tour.
   The play activity that I observe in my neighborhood generally involves
little or no emotional trust between the participants. Thus the focus is
limited to either hysterical grasping after mind numbing stimulus of any
kind or a direct cathartic mockery of focus on genuine issues, regardless
of cost or consequences. No-one dares put any genuine constructive heart
into any aspect of the sharing; the children overtly express cynicism,
cultural apathy and a complete lack of genuine patience; and the adults
look to me as if they concur. Everyone's art expression of any sort gets
yanked into a circus act scenario immediately; unquestioned, let alone
defended. Only art well rehearsed in secret can survive such treatment, so
almost all art in the neighborhood is a commercial import, rudely treated
but without the artist there to be saddened by it.
   My relative failure at finding a place in such a social fabric seems no
more a disappointment to me than failing to enter the violence of the
society for cultural anachronism. I see this play style of my neighborhood
as the kind of environment that the public schools are mandated by the
public to prepare children for. None of the data the school offers looks to
me to be intended to relate to life meaning or have any practical use; it
appears to be ammunition for psychic barage in a moshe pit of strangers.
   I believe that this kind of social moshe creates a need in most people
of all ages to protect their feelings by delegating food preparation,
mechanical repair, psychological or spiritual questions and choreography of
bodily expression to specialists in the formal economy; forcing a huge need
to make money and a look of pathetic crippledness on the part of a lot of
the actual people. All the glowing descriptions of cultural achievment,
presented by the school teachers and in the media, leave me unimpressed;
the resulting forest clear cuts and Ronald McDonald smiles look to me like a
waste of human spirit, not an act I could follow, even if I have the
competitive potential.
   Unlike my kid, I have failed in my lifelong pursuit of a place in the
shared emotional catharsis. The other adults likewise look like they spend
most of their time in overt avoidance of the moshe, though in conversation
always validating of it. They establish or join occasional choreographed
forays such as birthday parties, dates or the Oregon Country Fair. Many of
them scold me for never participating.
   The adults I grew up with prefer the use of platitudes and sound bites
rather than physical gestures of any kind for their choreographed
posturing. They focus a lot of their private time on competitively useful
data acquisition and they write to each other pompous public letters that I
am mostly unable to cope with reading.
   Nevertheless, I perceive an underlying beauty and friendliness in my kid
and to some degree in most of the others who compete in the pompous public
moshe. Some of the adults make an overt point of preventing the complete
vanquishing of anyone in their own direct environment, as I did with chess
in my youth. Most seem to overtly ignor the appauling content of ring
around the rosie, Maxwell's silver hammer or the history of King David;
with no allusion to mocking actual dead people, killing a teacher or
choreographing war for something to do.
   
   
   
   
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