{"id":10407,"date":"2011-07-24T14:12:16","date_gmt":"2011-07-24T18:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10407"},"modified":"2011-07-24T14:12:16","modified_gmt":"2011-07-24T18:12:16","slug":"qotd-school-isnt-for-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/07\/24\/qotd-school-isnt-for-everyone\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: School isn&#8217;t for everyone"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>If the communists hadn\u2019t 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. \u201cCan\u2019t say that I blame you,\u201d he said. \u201cThe comrades are crashing bores. I doubt if you\u2019d learn anything from them, but why take a chance. You\u2019d just have to spend years unlearning it, especially if it started with an \u2018e\u2019 like economics or ethics.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not sure if anybody was. In those days, there was no such illness as Attention Deficit Disorder, and in any event I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t rub me the wrong way.<\/p>\n<p>School did. The sound of chalk on blackboards did. What I suffered from wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019ve read. I wanted to think, absorb, fantasize and dream about characters and stories; they wanted me to parse and pr\u00e9cis. I was puzzled and frustrated by their fussy, fusty, pedantic, and pedestrian ways. They\u2019d show me Mona Lisa\u2019s smile, and ask me to count her teeth.<\/p>\n<p>George Jonas, <a href=\"http:\/\/fullcomment.nationalpost.com\/2011\/07\/24\/george-jonas-everything-i-know-i-learned-from-not-going-to-school\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Everything I know, I learned from not going to school&#8221;, <em>National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2011-07-24<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If the communists hadn\u2019t 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. \u201cCan\u2019t say that I blame you,\u201d he said. \u201cThe comrades are crashing bores. I doubt if you\u2019d learn [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,79,41,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-education","category-quotations","category-randomness"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2HR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10408,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10407\/revisions\/10408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}