There has been a memory I have from an experience I had in perhaps maybe second to fourth grade. A substitute teacher named “Ms. Crow” worked at the elementary school I went to. She gave us some sort of lecture about how the grade we are going to enter into isn’t “baby land” anymore. I’m not sure why. I don’t recall me or the rest of my class acting in any infantile or obnoxious way.
A specific thing she said stuck with me and frustrates me as I recall it from my big 23 year old perspective. She said in a very pious and righteous way, “If you don’t pay attention or try in class and get all F’s, you will grow up to be an adult that feels like an F.” The point of what she said, and why it leaves me so aggravated when I recall it, is not that she was wrong. It’s true that the public schooling system can inflict certain ideas and beliefs in you that will be ingrained inside of your mentality that feel so prominent that they attach themselves to you into adulthood. It’s that she felt as though this notion was self-validating and justified.
I never paid attention in class until I reached the third semester of 11th grade. As a child I would just day dream. I would look at the drawings in the history textbooks and imagine whatever was being illustrated being animated out and expanded upon. I grew up to be an adult that spent his 18th and 19th year of living feeling unworthy to even try anything new other than playing video games and downing energy drinks for the caffeine “high”. I didn’t have a good sleep schedule or exercise routine because I felt that the world would reject me if I tried to adjust myself to the outside world. I was very depressed. I felt like an F.
There is no real alternative to public schooling. The child isn’t treated like an autonomous being with their own set of moral principles and aesthetic sensibilities. The child cannot say “I want to learn math outside today!” or “I want to read any book I want with friends and start a book club!” The child is bullied and shoved into a box that reinforces predictable compartmentalization of the day, physical insulation, and an environment of feudal cliques who wage mental war on one another. The child hates this. The child may adapt and become accustomed to this, but somewhere deep down the child hates this machine.
I feel like I had to create my own term for what I am about to describe. I call it "Permanence Fallacy”. It is the notion that the structures, institutions, and attitudes in contemporary society are these monolithic structures that can never be brought down, and the reason they are monolithic is because they are ingrained within human nature. I detest this. Ms. Crow had this permanence fallacy. She believed that if you do not do well in the seemingly second to human nature institutions that you are bullied into as a child, then the system will prove itself to you to be all-encompassing, and the way it taunted you and crushed your self confidence and inner creativity will follow you as an adult. Until you die.
No. Fuck you. I have been dedicating my adult life to breaking out of the way I have been prodded upon and snuffed out. I will try new things. Learn new skills. I am not an “F” because that has no meaning to me. I do not wish to use the references you use. I do not believe that anything in contemporary society is indestructible and parallel to human nature. This is all unnatural and can be brought down. I am nothing like you.