Stories of the Bible, mythology and tales of the supernatural were my favorite reading material as a boy. I remember being far in the outfield during a tee-ball game and thinking not about the game, which seemed unimportant, but about entities that might contact me, for reasons I couldn't begin to understand, and what they might be like, and what they might say, and what powers they might be willing to share to get me out of difficult situations, such as when a ball dropped near me. I missed about three out of four fly balls, even the easy ones, and in truth all fly balls are easy. Back then I was afraid of the ball and thought it might hit me, and at any rate was uncoordinated and had difficulty performing any type of athletic maneuver, a damning fate for a boy. I envied the girls and thought they had an easier life by far, not being expected to do any of the things that I was expected to do.
My school years were difficult due to bullying, which overshadowed other aspects of school life, but the academic curriculum was easy, being little more than rehashes of previous material with a few new concepts thrown in on rare occasion and all of it taught at a snail's pace. I consider the twelve years in school as having been wasted on meaningless humiliations and degradations. None of the administrators, teachers or other students opposed the bullies, but sometimes the teachers and administrators were themselves bullies, because the staff was rife with rednecks. Concerned people such as my parents would ask me how my day went, and I would say it was hell. The better days were only boring, but the worse days were marked by bruises, physical or spiritual. Betrayals were common, friends becoming enemies just to curry favor with the more popular or else the stronger. There was no homosexual presence among the staff; every employee was at least nominally heterosexual or else maintained an impenetrable shield about their personal life, ensuring that I would feel like an alien from Mars. Growing up under such circumstances, I can see why X led to Y and then Z, and it seems to me, the field was sown and plowed by careless hands, and the scant harvest was their deserves.
I have an open mind when it comes to parents that abandon the public school system to try an alternative educational strategy such as private schools or even home-schooling. Home schooling is not just for religious fundamentalists that fear sex education and evolution. It is not just for racists that hate the presence of minority races. It is also for parents that don't want to put their kids in an environment where they will be unprotected from bullies. And the curriculum of some schools is a joke to say the least. Instead of future leaders, they train future Wal-Mart greeters.
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