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Grade school was in a bad neighborhood and rough. There was bullying and fights. I got used to it because I felt like I had no other option. High school was in a different neighborhood and much more peaceful. I was a teacher's pet so I did not feel confined, I enjoyed getting out of the house and often enjoyed interacting with other people. The schoolwork was easy so it was a pretty mellow time. It was later that I looked back and started to think that high school, too, was an unjustified waste of time. Even the nice teachers were part of a system of compulsion. My opinions about education really got cemented when I myself did teaching work for some time and so for the first time had to be the one doing the compelling. I am very glad that I got out of that way of making money. I find it viscerally disgusting on some level to make kids' lives more boring to shape them into something that their parents and other usually stupid authority figures think they should be. When I was a captive of the education system myself, once I got away from the violent school, my intellectual talents and easy ability to charm adults made me enjoy a lot about school but when I spent time as one of the captors I saw many bad examples of what forced education can do to fuck up a sensitive kid. From what I can remember, that is when I really started to hate the whole thing whole-heartedly.
Some might argue that this is bullshit because when I was in grade school I did not hate it, when I was in high school I did not hate it, so how can I speak about the issue?
Well, in grade school the immediate jungle reality of being around hundreds and hundreds of volatile young people and the occasional fear of getting assaulted were enough to keep any more abstract hate of the enabling system out of my consciousness.
And though I enjoyed high school to some extent, well, I suppose that there are also soldiers who enjoyed war and then became anti-war years later. That they enjoyed war does not invalidate their criticisms of it.
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