If the communists hadn’t nationalized the old Lutheran Gymnasium of Budapest, my father might have put his foot down. As it was, he resigned himself to my not going back to school in the fall of 1952. “Can’t say that I blame you,” he said. “The comrades are crashing bores. I doubt if you’d learn anything from them, but why take a chance. You’d just have to spend years unlearning it, especially if it started with an ‘e’ like economics or ethics.”
[. . .]
I’m not sure if anybody was. In those days, there was no such illness as Attention Deficit Disorder, and in any event I didn’t suffer from it. I could be tirelessly attentive, even obsessive, about things I liked. I could, and did, read voraciously. Futzing with details was a delight; I just needed to explore things that interested me in settings that didn’t rub me the wrong way.
School did. The sound of chalk on blackboards did. What I suffered from wasn’t ADD but SADD: School Attention Deficit Disorder. The sight of a classroom made me sleepy and hyperactive at the same time. Years after I dropped out, I had one recurring nightmare: I dreamt I was sitting in my bench in class, trying to explain to everyone it was a mistake because I had no business being there.
Some soar in a school setting; I could barely drift. I loved books, but hated the way teachers expected me to deal with what I’ve read. I wanted to think, absorb, fantasize and dream about characters and stories; they wanted me to parse and précis. I was puzzled and frustrated by their fussy, fusty, pedantic, and pedestrian ways. They’d show me Mona Lisa’s smile, and ask me to count her teeth.
George Jonas, “Everything I know, I learned from not going to school”, National Post, 2011-07-24
July 24, 2011
QotD: School isn’t for everyone
Comments Off on QotD: School isn’t for everyone
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
