School Days

I’m going to throw up a strong language warning here. 

The reason for that is that these posts take two basic forms.  The first is when I have an actual point about something I wish to articulate; the karma one for instance.  With those I’ll sit down and work out what I want to say, and then throw a bunch of big words into the mix so it looks like I know what I’m talking about.  The other form is when I have some sort of life story to tell, like I tried to sell a guitar to a religious door knocker.  Those ones are internal monologue kinda stuff which I just sit down and blurt out in one go.  This is one of those.  The warning is there because I have a filthy mouth, and what’s going on in my mind most likely isn’t any cleaner.

So school days.  I fucking hated my time at school.  Hated it.  I don’t mean scholastically; I enjoyed the academic side of things in the main, and at least until A Levels I found it pretty easy to the point where I could coast through most of it.  My gripe was with the social conventions which get forced on you and the cliques you have to deal with.  The social side of school is a closed environment; it has rules and conventions which you have to learn and kowtow to, and I was never very good at playing the game.

Part of that is what I brought to the table, there is no question of that.  I was a bookish precocious child.  I mean I was reading Stephen King novels at like eight years old for Christ’ sake.  As a part of that I wasn’t the most socially gregarious child, and that gets preyed on pretty quick.

The point is really that kids have to go through an awful lot of shit on an average school day.  Not just what people stereotypically think of as bullying, but just generally having your weaknesses and insecurities exposed and mocked.  It’s the closed environment of the school system which exasperates this.  If you’ve got someone giving you shit every day, there’s not a lot you can do about that.  You’re in the same classes, you still have to turn up every day and you’re powerless to change that.  I think that’s the cruel part, that if you really are having a hard time going through school you get to feel totally impotent about your ability to change it on top.  If some meathead keeps pounding on you for your lunch money the chances are that you’re not going to talk him round with a bunch of logic and reasoned debate.  He’s just going to rail on you more because you saw fit to open your mouth.  The same goes for if a teacher decides to latch onto you and generally make you feel small and insignificant.  Let’s not kid ourselves here, it happened back in my day and it happens today. 

So what do you do?  You play the game.  You find someone weaker and less secure than you and you mock them in order to increase your own social standing among your peers.  It sucks you into this social order and it is utterly self perpetuating.  I was as much a part of this as anyone else in that regard.  I was a funny fuck in school and I for sure used that to mock people at times and increase my own personal gravitas.  I’m in no way proud of it, but it certainly happened.

There’s a danger that this is going to come across as a personal whine, and it’s really not about that.  If anything, I got off pretty light going through school.  It didn’t make me like the experience any more, but plenty of kids caught way more shit than I ever did.  I caught enough though to have my confidence knocked and to second guess myself a fair bit, so I can only imagine what it was like for the kids who really were catching abuse, or getting beaten up, and just generally being fucked with in a relentless manner.  Kids can be unbelievably cruel and I think as adults we maybe forget how permanent and unyielding the school experience can feel.  You go in every day and you can do next to nothing to change your situation, and that brings a sense of permanence.  You start to think “this is my life, and it’s never changing”.

Well, it’s not, and I wish that message was put through schools more.  It’s not forever and you will affect your life in positive ways.  You’ll find when you hit the real world there’s basically a whole bunch of more rules and conventions to follow, but you don’t have to play the game anything like you did going through school.  You find you’re in some job and you’re working with some arse who’s giving you a hard time?  Fucking quit, it’s not that important.  Fucking quit and move on with your life on your own terms.

People should go into schools with the message that people in the main grow the fuck up and start to treat each other a little decently, and for those that don’t you don’t have to be subjected to their petty actions if you choose not to.  Kids need to hear that more.