... But I'm not!

When school started failing my daughter, I started to see I had been brainwashed, and what was worse? I was also participating in the brainwashing of my daughter.

I believed the only way to succeed in life was to finish school and get good marks... but I hadn't finished school and I was still alive! My partner hadn't finished school either, and he was still alive too!

Most of my friends had either not finished school, or hadn't done very well, and you know what? They wer e all smart people who were doing well in their lives.

So why did we all leave school? I left because I was afraid to fail.

I knew I was smart enough to do really well if I applied myself .. but therein lies the truth of it. I wanted to enjoy life! I was young and having fun, school wasn't fun, it was anti-social and boring. And my friends who quit had all quit for the same reasons, and those who stayed and didn't do well had failed for the same reasons.

Schools aren't for everyone, some people will do very well within the system, but others need to get out and experience life in order to discover their authentic selves.

Schools glorify certain subjects (maths and english) but completely devalue others like art, drama, and music. My friends were all smart kids but they preferred, and even excelled at humanities. However the institution simply loses those children between the cracks. How sad.

So, back to the subject at hand, and why I believed I was dumb. I went to a school to learn all the things deemed crucial for modern life but I hadn't really learnt much - or so I thought.

I was literate, I was perfectly competent numerically, and I had all the skills necessary to acquire any further knowledge I needed, but I hadn't learnt anything about myself or what I was good at. I also had my literate and numeric abilities completely undermined by all the institutional measurements. But the things I had never learnt, or had forgotten, never caused me a moment's grief.

After having a good look at all this, I concluded that the emphasis schools placed on many subjects was not proportionate to it's usefulness in real life.