Education. So fucking good it's mandatory. Best fucking idea since conscription. Doing anything with that life? Not any more, you're not. You're coming with me, kid.
School. Where we pack up the absolute most important things in the entire world—to us, I mean. I know none of you give a shit about someone else's rugrants. Anyway, we suit up our future in pigtails and new-smelling pencils, and we pack them off to the learning factory.
Did I say learning? I'm sorry, so very sorry. Learning is incidental. The learning we care about, anyway. What do we learn there? We learn that someone else decides when we're allowed to piss. We learn that to speak is a great privilege bestowed upon us—briefly—by an anointed stranger.
Above all, we learn that someone else knows better that we do, and they will hammer us down until the railroad is perfectly smooth.
Let me tell you a story. (It's a figure of speech. You have no choice. I'm already telling you a story.) I went out into the world, I met a nice girl, and together we made a couple of brilliant, beautiful new humans.
Being a fatherly boy—that is to say, a normal, decent human being, not a schmuck—I love and care a great deal about the two girls who are my sun and stars. Being not a complete idiot, I may have noticed that my two daughters are not stamped, identical coins. My younger daughter is as bright as the day and as warm as a summer breeze. And just asd fickle as the wind. Creative, laughing, funny, she wants to be around people and to make them happy and be happy around them.
Not the scholastic type my youngest.
Where was I? Ah. Humans. So. Two daughters. One is bookish, driven, agonizes over grades, stays up late on schoolwork, sits with me trying to understand her mathematics. The other? Life is full of people and places, and she wants to meet them, see them, talk to them, play, laugh, gossip—flitter-flutter-attention-deficit-whatever-the-hell-who-gives-a-rat's-ass, let's get some living done kind of girl!
One of these two has some serious trouble in school.
Plot twist: It's not the flitter-flutter extrovert.
No, friends. The daughter who had to attend "credit recovery" before school each day of the week or risk losing fucking credit for her classes was the one who had straight fucking A's!
That's what I'm talking about! They don't want to take our children from us so that they become educated. My daughter missed too many days of school, made A's, and scored highly on the standardized test batteries. Do you know which of these matters to the petty tyrants that write laws for—and admininster to—the institutions of instututionalization?
That they show up.
Here's the lesson, folks, and you can see the result of this anywhere you care to look:
It doesn't matter what you know, it doesn't matter how or whether you perform. All that matters is that you show up, and obey.
So stay in school, kids, cause otherwise your life might actually mean something.