Self-loathing

So that anyone who is good at school is good at what, exactly? Doing what they’re expected to, keeping themselves in check, not attracting attention? All behavioral definitions, to which learning can attach itself but only incidentally—no one who has been in a school awhile can believe that learning is the order of the day, whatever they might say. The main thing everyone is doing is marking time, really. Teachers get paid, students get released sooner or later to find their own way to do the same. A school is a mechanism for wasting time safely. 

As far as the younger grades go, Rousseau would be impressed. But along with this the passions are awoken as early as may be, and the masses kept congealed, and authority barefaced, and the preparation not for living a human life but for behaving in society—and all this would appall the gentle scoundrel. It even gets through to some of the buried natural impulses or what you might call them, the sense of justice, the urge to do something real that’s in us. No one likes school the way it is now—that’s the strongest argument there is that it has to change radically. 

And the kind of incubation you get as a student being stuck in it for so long, having it impinge on your conscious and unconscious life, having all your interactions mediated by it, you grow immune to it after awhile. For your own sake you don’t think about how it could be any other way. Or else you keep your eyes and your mind open, and learn all you can in spite of it, and accepting, whether you realize it or not at the time, that much of what you’re going to be learning is the very structures and failings of that institution conditioning you. I feel like all the bright kids in public schools today are doomed to become teachers, to redress all the ills that stared them in the face their whole life. It’s an incredible irony, a last-ditch stroke of attrition from a school that’s burning itself out, and a democracy and a world that look like they’re doing the same. Only I can’t tell if they really are, or if I only see them through the lens of the school, so it just looks that way. 

Somewhere between the sense of nature and the debacle of a school, a very clear vocation outlines itself, to bring schools better into line with human potential and nature. But then this vocation arises from the very grounds it seeks to re-cultivate—it questions itself in the same spirit of questioning that characterizes it—and it gets very muddled in the place where intentions attempt to shape realities. All the practical questions—how and where and with what the new school could arise—remain unanswered, barely formulated. Compelling on the field of ideas, the calling falls down powerless so far in the world.