For a long time, I thought there must be something wrong with me.
I hated school. Every day, I hated it.
The stress was so terrible that I couldn’t eat. I had to wear suspenders to keep my pants up. Belts didn’t work. No matter how tight we pulled them, they always slid right off of me.
Sometimes, I vomited in class. The smell of food at the cafeteria was nauseating. It didn’t help that every kid chewed with his mouth open, or spit on the floor, or did all kinds of other disgusting things.
On most days, I waited until the lunch ladies weren’t looking and I tossed my uneaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich into the garbage. If there was nothing in my belly there was nothing I could throw up. That meant that nobody would scream at me.
We sat in classes with conservative teachers preaching conservative values. We discussed the white history of America. We were lectured on the importance of respect, even as the teachers did everything they could to humiliate us on a daily basis.
People think that schools are liberal, but that’s not true. In rural, conservative areas the liberal mindset is treated like the plague. Intelligence is seen as a defect. It’s like conservative teachers can smell it on you and it disgusts them. They try to pressure you into being so miserable you starve yourself to death.
But they’re also lazy, so if you learn to deflect attention, you can survive.
Closing doors that lead to new opportunities
Today, my own kids are excited when the school year is set to start. This is new territory. I have no idea how to relate to them.
They eagerly sign up for programs and participate in sports and choir and anything else that is offered. All I can do is get out of the way. I can’t guide them because every instinct in my body still resonates with the belief that school is awful.
In my childhood, I spent the minimum amount of time at school that was required by law. I rushed home and ran out into the woods to read a book by myself (when I could get away with that). It was expected that my first loyalty was to the farm.
I was supposed to do well in school. I was supposed to get all As, but at the same time, I was conditioned to be mistrustful of the lessons. I knew the farm was the only future.
Although it was never explicitly stated, I understood that if I did too well in my studies it would raise suspicions. I needed to keep attention off me both at school and at home. I settled into the orbit of A- and B+. In my family, that was the place to remain invisible. I discovered this through trial and error.
I learned my dad both needed something to criticize and something to make him proud. Living beneath the weight of impossible contradictions is the burden of rural life.
“Teachers don’t know anything…”
I could always get a laugh at home or with the extended family by running down my teachers. We’d talk about how ridiculous their lessons were, how impractical.
Our family considered itself “liberal,” though I don’t know who my parents voted for. They didn’t put stickers on their cars or signs in their yard. Yard signs would have been a waste of money since our nearest neighbor was miles away.
I had two aunts and an uncle who were teachers. My grandma was a teacher. Yet, at every family gathering, the topic of conversation always turned to running teachers down. The teachers present would passively nod along, disgusted with the shortcomings of their profession.
I was expected to get good grades, be a good student, respect my teachers, and also not respect them because they were fools. I settled into a pattern of behavior. If I said the wrong thing, I was punished. Electric shocks keep you in line. Pain avoidance becomes an involuntary response. It gets so you don’t even think to contemplate certain concepts.
I’m not talking about rote memorization. This is conditioning. It’s similar to how you can drive home from work without even thinking about it. This is how a rural, conservative education works. Don’t be dismissive. It’s highly complex and very difficult to overcome once you’ve been subjected to that kind of abuse.
“You have to eat something!”
Eventually, somebody at the school noticed that I was too thin so they called my parents into the office. I got in trouble for throwing my food away.
“You’ve got to eat something! You can’t think, you can’t study if you don’t eat.”
As if thinking and studying were important in a rural town.
“The cafeteria is disgusting, all the kids spit food all over the place, they smell bad from playing, they always have snot running down their faces!” But I didn’t say that. I knew it was useless to complain. I just nodded and looked at the floor.
Mom was worried, “You have to eat something.”
“Peanut butter makes me choke.”
“Well, maybe you could eat something else?”
I thought about it. “What about Frosted Flakes?”
“The cereal?”
“Yeah, I could bring a thermos of milk and hide in a corner to eat it. I think I could keep that down.”
Learning to read
The first and last time I was excited about school was when they promised to teach us how to read. I had a Lord of the Rings calendar based on the 1978 film by Ralph Bakshi. As I said, I spent all of my free time out in the woods and something about those 12 images made me believe that story held answers for me.
I had to read it!
Reading lessons started, and it was almost as if they were deliberately trying to prevent us from learning. So, I taught myself.
I purchased a copy of the novelization of Raiders of the Lost Ark from the pharmacy. I felt that I could learn to read by working through a story I’d seen on the silver screen. I was around seven or eight.
I got in trouble again, this time for carrying a book around at school.
“He’s just showing off, he’s not really reading that.”
or
“This book is too advanced for him.”
or
“If he’s going to read a chapter book, it should be a literary classic not pulp trash.”
or
“He’s reading his book and he’s not paying attention.”
Once again with the contradictory messages. It’s hard to learn how to read when your teacher keeps knocking your book out of your hands.
Eventually the other kids learned well enough, at least, to make their way through pre-approved ditto copied assignments. I stubbornly refused to give up my books.
Few of my classmates were ever caught walking the halls while carrying a paperback.
The seeds of resistance
I started to figure out that I could use the contradictions to my advantage. I discovered this by accident through innocent questions, “I thought you said it was important to read?”
That made the all-powerful adults start to fumble and the issue would be forgotten. They didn’t like the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, that’s your armor when you’re trying to survive in a rural town. You have to learn to use their absurd axioms against them like insult dueling the Sword Master in Monkey Island.
I went through the novelizations of all the Star Wars films and Indiana Jones films. Then I moved on to The Call of the Wild. That was a problem because the novel was contained in an anthology, and carrying around a big book made me a target.
“You’re never going to finish that!” nagged the kids.
Of course it was simply impossible to explain I was only reading one story in a collection of stories. That was beyond their ability to comprehend. Also, I wasn’t taunting them by reading a book, but that, too, they believed.
The first lesson I learned was to not engage.
The contradictions cancel each other out
The early days were the worst, that was when the hopelessness was most pronounced. I was always punished no matter what I did. It made me hate school. It made me lose weight. No matter what I thought, it was wrong.
But then I found a way.
Conservative philosophy is filled with contradictions. However, once you’ve had to deal with them long enough, you see how they cancel each other out. I didn’t know anything about algebra when I was seven, but I did learn how to deflect attacks by circling back to fundamental beliefs.
“I thought I was supposed to do well in school.”
“I thought I was supposed to always try my best.”
“I thought I was supposed to be respectful.”
“Well… yeah, but what you’re doing…” and they couldn’t finish because they’d already come too close to recognizing the blatant flaws of their deeply rooted beliefs. That was a place they would not go. It was Mordor to them. They stay in a perpetual holding pattern bouncing back and forth between the things their philosophy is not equipped to recognize or explain.
They never consider abandoning their philosophy. That’s off the map.
Build a suit of armor that shines like a mirror
As a child in a rural public school I learned that as long as you could frame your behavior in a way that aligned with a sacred concept, you were safe. This alignment is the purpose of conservative conditioning, this is why they show such rampant support for God, family, and country. Unquestioning reverence is the way it’s supposed to work.
What they don’t expect is that kids will figure out how to manipulate these concepts like positive and negative terms in a complex polynomial. You can get them to cancel out, and it creates doorways to worlds conservatives can never imagine.
Soul crushing gatekeepers will present an equation that contains the square root of negative one and declare, “That can NEVER be solved, so there’s no point even looking for an answer. It’s IMPOSSIBLE!”
It’s hard to argue with them. But they refuse to recognize that if you keep working a function, sometimes the impossible terms simply disappear.
There is a way.
Don’t give up
You put your head down and keep reading. You nod at them when they tell you all your efforts are futile. You take their B and you don’t complain because it allows you to fly under the radar.
Above all, you don’t give them any reason to place bigger obstacles in your path. Drawing any attention to yourself works against you. There are only enemies.
At the time, I didn’t realize I was performing complex, philosophical algebra. I was just trying to survive. Mostly, I followed the same blind intuition that compelled me to learn how to read. I follow it still.
I’ve even found some answers along the way, but only some.
I expect my kids will find more. In fact, I think they already have.
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