More from my future autobiography: on education

As I  mentioned recently, following a radio interview, I started work on an autobiography. Completing it is going to take years - apart from having limited spare time and energy (especially given a major family illness) and the technical challenges of writing well. I've pasted below another extract from a chapter which addresses some of what I experienced in high school in the 1970s.

One of the downsides of Mackay - actually, other places as well - was the teachers at the high school who tried to use my academic performance against my sister. Maybe they were so stupid they thought being compared to someone else like was “motivating” rather than a source of despair, something that would lead to hating school and irritation with the person being used as the “standard”? Maybe they were so burned out and embittered by their experiences - and I rejected the suggestions of some of my teachers that I get into teaching because of the behaviour of my disaffected, disengaged and disruptive fellow students (the curriculum was built on rote learning and around making us into cogs for the economy) -  that they enjoyed the spitefulness of this. Maybe their instruction had been to use this, and they were so unprofessional / incompetent that they didn’t notice it wasn’t working, or they did and, Titanic like, kept sailing on, not knowing what to do. 

Maybe their upbringing was so bereft of love that they genuinely thought competition was “good”.

Everyone is unique, and FFS, everything - medical treatment, education, everything - should be adapted to suit the uniqueness of each and every individual. Otherwise is just demeaning all of us, including those doing the blandifying, into cogs on a Ford-assembly line. That harms each and every one of us, robs the world of massive amounts of talent (how many Michaelangelos, Eleanor Roosevelts, and Albert Einsteins have been lost to the world in extreme poverty? How many Nicola Teslas, Florence Nightingales,and Marie Curies lost in the mendacity of a mundane education system? How many Leonardo da Vincis, Rachel Carsons,and Nelson Mandelas have been lost to inequality of a society - especially a stupid, violent society like the USA [thank the Goddess I don’t live there!] which kills so many people who are different?), and winds up forcing society into putting resources into bottling up the problems it has created?

I saw all that in Mackay’s Milton Street high school.

I saw an Indigenous kid who had a first rate mind left isolated and locked out of opportunity by the racist hostility of teachers and the community (I offered [when he was giving me a hard time, actually, which surprised him] to help him with his homework once, but he lived in a camp out of town), I saw kids getting forced into stereotypes from the course choices they were “presented”, and I saw kids being alienated by the educational - cog-making - “system”.

My sister, by the way, turned out to be a magnificent woman - an outstanding mother, a caring woman, and someone with a career in a caring area that society downplays - well, downplays until times like now: I am writing the first draft of this while in the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

I don’t think my sister realises how much of how she turned out was innate to her, but I also have to give credit to her husband, and her children, who also helped bring out her inner talents.

Going back to Milton Street high school in the 70s, we had some teachers who were also trying to change the system - or buck it, and bring out the best in the kids they were teaching.

I also saw other kids who were trying to do the same - this was when the counter-cultural revolution, or the “New Age” was big. Hippies were, to use modern lingo, “a thing”, as was peace, love, and communes - I’m trying not to visualise that accompanied by a cloud of dubious legality and a long “maaaaaan”.

I can still remember telling off one of my friends when he mocked one of the girls at that school for advocating for a more loving society. And he readily acceded my point: the culture then - and now - was built on engaging with friends (“mateship”) by using unhealthy types and degrees of “making fun” of each other and those who were outside that particular group. It was to his credit that he could see that, but it was to none of our credit that we didn’t look more actively more for wholesome ways of being. 

A couple of times I mustered my spoons of courage and tried to talk to my teachers about the unfairness of what they were doing with my sister. However, I was a bit intimidated by their status, my eloquence was limited, and those particular teachers didn’t see either of us as humans, just cogs labelled “kid” to be given a notional listening to, patted on the head, and fed into the next part of the machine. 

My sister and I survived the experience, and went on to live our lives. I’ve sometimes wondered how many didn’t? I went back to my 25 year high school reunion - the only one held, and some people had surprisingly thrived, some had drifted, and others were still suffering from bullying and other experiences. (And I had a big surprise for everyone.) Not all students were there. 

Our society’s journey in education has progressed since then, not always for better: may it get better - inclusive, individualised, and beyond turning out cogs for the economy - for the sake of all us.