A lot of people seem to think it’s good for smart kids to be thrown together with “normal” kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don’t fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a “pep rally” at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.
If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children…
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done…
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.
An interesting essay, with a few sideswipes on school, surburbia, and the nature of popularity (“Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It’s much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.”).
Cool link. Where’d ya find it? 😀
Posted by a cool person who I didn’t know until recently had a LiveJournal, now that you mention it…
Cool link. Where’d ya find it? 😀
I take my eyes off the new Popular Science magazine for split second to check email and my favorite blogs, and the first thing I see is an essay about nerdiness.
Nice.
Actually, I’ve read “Hackers and Painters”, a book of which this is a part of. I highly recommend it. It is very insightful and sheds light onto some problems in our falsified world.
The book looks interesting. I like his writing style,and I’m thinking about ordering the book. Got a gift certificate at amazon.com…
I take my eyes off the new Popular Science magazine for split second to check email and my favorite blogs, and the first thing I see is an essay about nerdiness.
Nice.
Actually, I’ve read “Hackers and Painters”, a book of which this is a part of. I highly recommend it. It is very insightful and sheds light onto some problems in our falsified world.
I ran across this essay about a year and a half ago, and made a point of printing it out for. I think it’s pretty insightful, and does a decent job of describing high school as I remember it.
I ran across this essay about a year and a half ago, and made a point of printing it out for. I think it’s pretty insightful, and does a decent job of describing high school as I remember it.
Posted by a cool person who I didn’t know until recently had a LiveJournal, now that you mention it…
The book looks interesting. I like his writing style,and I’m thinking about ordering the book. Got a gift certificate at amazon.com…
Hey, you might also be interested in The Underground History of American Education. It’s an entire book, not just an essay; it’s much more far-reaching and damning than what you have here, though more broadly-based. I’m almost done with the first part at this point, and it’s definitely been worth the read for me.
From ch. 2, “An Enclosure Movement for Children”:
I found the link via kuro5hin. Localroger’s review (yes, localroger of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect fame) is worth reading in and of itself.
Hey, you might also be interested in The Underground History of American Education. It’s an entire book, not just an essay; it’s much more far-reaching and damning than what you have here, though more broadly-based. I’m almost done with the first part at this point, and it’s definitely been worth the read for me.
From ch. 2, “An Enclosure Movement for Children”:
I found the link via kuro5hin. Localroger’s review (yes, localroger of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect fame) is worth reading in and of itself.