Gedachtegoed

19/2/05: Education Can Suck My Nuts

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/archive/20050118-0219.htm

Recently, in addition to doing some work for Bad Brain Entertainment which I may have mentioned, I’ve gotten involved with another professional design studio based here in Brisbane, and I’ve actually met the rest of the team in person, astoundingly. I’m the scriptwriter and we’re making a demo to secure some venture capital. If all goes well we all quit our day jobs by next year. I don’t get paid anything at the moment, though, so don’t think you can stop donating.

So, there you go – keep writing adventure games and releasing them online, pimply dreamers, and one day they’ll be enough to impress the right people to get you into the industry. It was while I was getting to know my new colleagues, however, that I discovered that every single one of them had been to university except me. Ho no, you can’t get talent like mine in university, I told myself, it’s as ingrained as the congealed Weetabix on the breakfast bowls. But then I put some more thought to it, and I came to a rather upsetting conclusion.

Friends, it’s like this. My education has done absolutely nothing for me.

And I don’t mean that as hyperbole. I can think of literally nothing about my present situation and intellect for which I can thank schooling, and I really thought hard. At first I thought this was cool. Then I realised that this meant I had spent ten or twelve years of my life drinking a cocktail of boredom and misery when I could have spent all that time playing Sonic the Hedgehog and gotten much the same out of it. That’s, like, about one seventh of my time on Earth, gone, for no fucking reason. Now I’ve only got the remaining six-sevenths to leave my legacy for future generations. That’s not going to be enough time to fulfill my major life objective – to divert a river so that it spells out the words ‘EARTH NEEDS YOUR SEX’ in joined-up writing, large enough to be visible from space. Thanks a lot, school system.

I can see a career in professional game design without a telescope, but I got here on the strength of my freeware games. I taught myself how to program with AGS. I learned to type from an early age with the family Amstrad, then the family C64, then the family Amiga. At school they only let you near a computer once in a blue moon to play one of those god-forbid-I-call-them games where you play Hangman in German or some shit.

I’m in Australia because I saved up money from my last major job in England, entering data for a surveying company. I got that job because they needed pretty much anyone, and I just happened to be around, and I held onto it because I was good at it. I doubt they even knew or cared if I had any qualifications. I found it impossible to find work before this job.

I met a lot of friends at school, but lost touch with most of them when they went to university, and the rest of them when I moved to the neighbouring hemisphere.

The more I think about it, the more it seems certain – school has given me nothing. I studied German for four years and the only phrase I can recall presently is “Mein Hut hat drei Ecke”, and I’m not even sure I’ve got the gender right. From science, I remember that holding a test tube while a red powder and a blue powder are reacting inside will sting your fingers like a bitch, but I couldn’t tell you what the powders were called. I learned more useful information from the Scouts than I ever did at school, and I spent most of my time in the scouts sitting in the corner scoffing sweeties from the tuck shop.

Which is not to say school taught me absolutely nothing. Ho yes, it taught me that the slightest deviation from the norm will result in ostracision and physical chastisement. It taught me that being able to absorb and parrot meaningless trivia was the only valid intellectual skill. And I learned that I could expect to get the shit kicked out of me in sub-zero temperatures for two hours every Monday afternoon.

I and everyone else in the world are subjected to cruel psychological torture for over a decade, when we are fragile kids no less, but it’s only now that I get the biggest kick in the balls. The realisation that, contrary to what I was led to believe, none of it was for my benefit. What’s even worse is that there’s no-one to direct this anger at; the school system is run by a bunch of clueless but well-meaning jerks, continuing with how things have always been just because they’re too afraid to change. I’m pretty mentally fucked up from my school days, and I dread to think what would have happened if I’d stuck through the sixth form, or God forbid university. I’m pretty sure quite a few of my readers are in full-time education, so my advice to them is to get the fuck out. Qualifications are meaningless. Exams are just diagnostic programs for the obedient little robot society wants you to be.

God damn I’m depressed now, knowing that society forced me to waste a full decade that I’ll never get back. I almost can’t be bothered trying to be funny. Here’s my suggestion for an alternative to school.

For the first few years, have school as normal, but restricted to teaching kids the basics – reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, so they can at least function at the necessary level. Then, when they’re about eight years old, and learned everything they’d need to know for, say, working behind the meat counter at Sainsbury’s, we move them onto the new school, which I like to call AWESOMEDOME TEN THOUSAND.

The Awesomedome Ten Thousand is basically a big circular arena divided into two halves. One contains a library with a wide range of fiction and textbooks, drawing and writing material, as well as some of those snobby intellectual board games like Scrabble. The other half contains a pile of sports equipment and sharp objects. Children come to the Awesomedome Ten Thousand for five or six hours a day, and must choose in which half of the dome they wish to spend this time beforehand. The children cannot move from one sector to the other at any point during the day, and they cannot take anything from the Awesomedome.

That way, the clever kids with a genuine curiosity of the world can be free to pursue their own interests in the intellectual section, gathering only the information that is immediately necessary. And in the other half, all the violent sporty kids can fucking kill each other and leave the ones with actual futures alone. I guarantee you that, as well as no longer wasting everybody’s time, this new system will produce a perfect geniocratic society within two generations.

I’m finished with this topic; you have permission to agree with me now.

-Yahtzee

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