I am just the substitute

“You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”
--The Brothers Karamazov

Maybe the school day is already too long. So much wasted time, husbanding resources of focus and keeping protected the inner life, the still-growing identity that can’t be shown all the time to just anyone and is liable to be jostled, to overcompensate, to be spooked by glimpses of its own grandeur. Afraid of not living up to it, not finding it again, maybe, kids prefer to conspire for mediocrity, to find excuses.

If kids realized that school is open—that they need not be there if they don’t want to learn, or if for what they want to know about they can learn it better someplace else—would any still come? What would classes look like then? (But it takes a long time to learn just how wide open is life, and it's easy to unlearn.)

The old admonitions uphold less and less. Whether because there’s any less correlation in reality between hard work in school and a good job post-graduation than there ever was, or because it has become more acceptable to question the way of life that holds up hard work and good jobs as its chief end—at any rate the kids can’t be forced to do this work that seems to have little or no bearing on their life, and they have every right to act like it.

‘Did your parents ever read to you when you were little?'

'No.'

'Really?'

'No, we don’t do that, that’s something other people do, not us.’

And then I should have read to them. In the other class where the kid was ‘in the bathroom’ an awful long time, then when he did come back let go some evidently pestilential farts, sending everyone scattering and laughing, all appearance of decorum abandoned, I said something like,

‘What would happen if every time someone farted everyone dropped what they were doing and ran off laughing, acting like this? Nothing would ever get done, people could hardly have a serious conversation, or plan an event. It would be so much worse than terrorism, so much more disruptive, and anyone could be responsible, your own body could betray you. In fact, that’s probably how the dinosaurs went extinct, they kept farting and laughing so much that they ended up never going out to get food or doing any of their dinosaurly chores, (or evolving for that matter), and finally their world collapsed and they all starved.'

'No, that didn’t happen to the dinosaurs!' said a girl, catching on I wasn’t actually mad at them.

'Yep. Look, what I’m saying is there’s a time to have fun and there’s a time to do work,’ and that’s what school is now, a time to do work so boring it is rent asunder all the time by bursts of mindless fun or destructiveness. But so,

‘Is there anyplace you wouldn’t act like this? A place you respect?'

'Church.’ Then again, school shouldn’t be too much like that. Nobody said the library, that place that should seem magical in reality before it reduces to being so merely metaphorically. Now it’s mostly computers in there taking up all the space, pressing the books back even more than ever into the corners and obscurity. Still a place the homeless can go, but they shouldn’t have to. No one should be homeless or jobless who doesn’t want to be (can’t forget, though, that that threat or pressure to conform by the possible loss of these things, homes, jobs, could be seen, from a certain perspective, as the invitation to a great freedom. A great, smelly freedom).