Education...

I don't have kids. I don't want kids. These two things combine to produce a general indifference to educational issues. It is, as the saying goes, someone else's problem.

But, as I was once a student myself, I still sometimes feel compelled to comment when the school system produces an example of complete and utter stupidity. It's bad enough when the government forces you to spend 1/3 of your life locked into small, uncomfortable, intellectually-stifling spaces with teachers trying to push propaganda into your head (and maybe, if you get lucky, an occasional tidbit of useful knowledge). When I was being subjected to the indoctrination sequence commonly known as "high school", even granting that I was not being subjected to the public school system, I was still heavily proselytized to on the matters of sex (don't do it, and here's how), drugs (don't do them), and rock'n'roll (known to lead to sex and drugs). They pulled some crazy stunts in an effort to "make a point" about whatever social ill was currently highest on their internal priority list. However, they didn't ever go so far as to tell me one of my classmates had died.

Wait; let me back up.

At one point in my high school experience, a teacher interrupted the class to tell the whole class that one of my classmates had died. This was a pretty small class, so while I didn't know the person involved very well, they were definitely a known face and a reasonably friendly person. I was pretty shocked that they had felt the need to kill themselves, as frankly, I hadn't noticed anything wrong. Everyone has issues, but the issues have to be pretty serious to rise to the level of suicide... and I was hardly the most social type, so the other students were undoubtedly significantly closer to the missing girl than I.

I remember thinking at one point, as the entire school went about it's business that day in a state of mourning, that this whole exercise was a pretty sick joke, and that any time now they would cancel all the scheduled "student counseling" and "trauma management" sessions in favor of announcing to the whole school that the "suicide" was a trick to make us think about the consequences of drinking or driving or doing drugs or something. Small though it was, the school had it's own designated mental health worker there to keep the students happy and smiling and carefree as they were indoctrinated... which, of course, required playing all sorts of sick jokes like this to "raise consciousness" about whatever seemed lowest that day.

I couild spin tales of DARE videos describing what drugs do to your brain and MADD videos with footage of ACTUAL REAL DEAD PEOPLE from drunk driving accidents. I won't bother... but you get the idea. There was definitely a bit of a history of this bullshit. I suppose that's not unusual.

So I spent a large part of the day waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the announcement that, hey, no one was really dead, we're just trying to make you think about the possibility that maybe one of your classmates is feeling a little depressed and needs some support...

At some point, I realized that there wasn't going to be any such announcement. That someone I had known was dead. That the grief counselors were really doing grief counseling. That some of my classmates, who had known the deceased better than I had, and had probably heard the news the night before, were sporadically crying for a good reason. That the people who were really close to the deceased weren't in class at all, not because their vegan diets had made them feel less than fresh that morning... but because they had lost a friend they were close to.

What does it say about our educational system that students learn to assume that the authority figures in their lives are deliberately lying to them?

Real tragedies happen. We don't need to fake them.

Posted on 2008-06-13 13:09:00.0 by matthew@triggerfinger.org

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