Flada Blog

My 20 year reunion is coming up this year. I’ve never been to a reunion and probably won’t go this year. There are actually two high schools where I could legitimately go to their reunion if I were so inclined. That’s because I went to school in a town in northern Minnesota from third grade until about halfway through tenth grade. Then I moved to another town and went to school there for a couple years.

The funny thing is that if I were to go to one of these reunions, I would feel far more welcome at the one with people who were my classmates for only 2 years. At the northern Minnesota school, my siblings and I (with the possible exception of my older brother) were treated like lepers. We were from Indiana originally so we had accents. Also, we lived in a trailer in the woods for a few years without power or running water which made us too different. By the time I moved away, I’d changed the minds of most of my classmates, but the emotional scars that they gave me when I was younger never completely healed.

My brother thinks it’s hilarious that the kids teased me with the name “Bacon Man” in third and fourth grades due to the smell of woodsmoke that saturated my clothes and hair. Even I can see some humor in it today, but I sure didn’t see any at the time. In sixth or maybe seventh grade, I remember sitting on the bus on a field trip to the Depot Museum in Duluth. I was assigned in a seat by the aisle with one of the pretty girls in my class seated next to the window. If there had been a way for her to physically merge with the wall/window of the bus she would have because it’s not physically possible to cower further away from yours truly than she did. Interestingly, she and I became friends by the time I moved away in tenth grade partly because of my awesome singing talents in the choir and Madrigals.

The worst remaining psychological damage is that I still don’t feel like I fit in very well in social situations. This, despite the fact that I know I’m a guy people like, who is funny, witty, and charming (if I do say so myself).

But what does this have to do with what I learned in public school? Well, I plan to write another entry regarding what I feel are the most important things a child should learn to have a successful and happy life. But prior to writing that, I wanted to discuss what I learned in school. When I gave it a lot of thought, I discovered that mostly I learned a deeply-seated mistrust for most people and a downright dislike for many people. In my article on why you should homeschool, I didn’t even discuss this reason: I don’t want my kids to grow up disliking people the way that I do. I don’t want them to be bitter and cynical. Not that I’m bitter and cynical all the time, but I have my moments.

So, did I learn anything else that was important in school? You bet. A handful of great teachers taught me about math, science, computers, and language. Every social-science teacher I had was a horrible teacher so I despised those classes–it wasn’t until later that I developed my current love for politics and history. Everything else I learned outside of the classroom either from mentors, my parents, or myself. So, in a sense, the things I use or enjoy the most today–reading, writing, history, politics, philosophy–I learned through home-schooling methods even though I wasn’t a home-schooled student.

Even in some of the subjects in which I had great teachers, there were other teachers in other years who were terrible. In ninth grade science, I remember an essay question on a homework assignment that asked why steel ships float. I remember my answer to this day:

The mass of the ship and all of the air, equipment, and people onboard will only displace an equal mass of water. Once that mass of water is displaced, the ship will be unable to displace more and will float. That is to say the average density of ship and all of its contents is less than the density of an equal volume of water.

My answer did not match whatever it was that the textbook said, so my answer was marked wrong. Despite bringing to the teacher’s attention that I was right, I still received a mark for that answer.

I conclude that the useful things I learned in public school from the great teachers I had, could have been taught to me in about two years. Yet, the system made me go for twelve. My mind boggles at all the things I could have learned in those wasted ten years.