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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35036 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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You have to remember that this site/former subreddit heavily leans toward the type of person who despised going to high school. The median person, while thankful they're no longer in high school, doesn't think of it as some evil prison. Like, as an actual poor-ish kid who was in honor/AP classes, I actually largely enjoyed school (outside of math, because I wasn't great at it).

I thought that the "kid who was in honor/AP classes" was sort-of the majority of the people here, so why would they despise going to the high-school?

And now I noticed that there is a distinction where you reference the time in "high-school" and the Goodguy just has "school" in his comment.

Former AP kid checking in. What a boring waste of time (most of) high school was. Just sitting in an uncomfortable chair hour after hour. Filling out some busy work worksheet in one class. Half paying attention to a lecture in another class while finishing all my homework. Reading novels in class. Getting told to put that book away, what are you doing, can you pay attention? But there's so little content that I'll ace the class without particularly focusing on in class lectures.

At the time I knew something valuable was being squandered by spending much of my teenage years sitting around bored.

I obviously learned valuable things in high school. But far too little content spread among hours of sitting around bored. As the beneficiary of a good public high school, taking all available honors and AP classes, getting an AP Scholar award, etc: I don't have fond memories of high school.

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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