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Well there's a difference between being good at it and liking it.
I never did mind learning things, but doing pointless busywork and being under the unrestrained diktat of petty tyrants with no appeals? Yeah I was pretty mad about that. Getting fucked with by people who have authority over you with no recourse isn't fun.
I felt about school like I assume Russians did about the Soviet Union by the end. Just going through the motions because you're not going to change the damn thing whilst knowing it's mostly bullshit.
And much like in the Soviet Union, excellence can buy you the ability to not have to think about authority not liking you, so I tried to be Sergei Korolev as much as possible.
Still, I think I owe my enduring skepticism of institutional power at least in part to those early encounters with the possibility of its abuse. And I assume I'm not alone in that.
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