Often, I would answer “nothing.” The first few times I answered that it was a cop-out so that I did not have to talk about school. “Nothing” was an answer that led to sardonic remarks on how I did nothing that day. But after a while, I thought about it and I really wasn’t doing anything in most of my classes. I enjoyed going to school but in retrospect, I do not know what I gained from going to America's finest indoctrination service.
For much of high school, during a time when the human mind has a chance to be remolded and reprogrammed to think correctly for the rest of life, my teachers all too often “lectured” (if you could call it that) from a textbook and then left us to do whatever for the remaining forty-five minutes to an hour left in class. That “whatever” consisted of worksheets, readings, long-term projects like papers or group assignments, and sometimes projects in the computer lab.
Teachers were not offering us advice on how to take in what we were learning and apply it to our future lives in American society. And they most certainly were not offering us any ideas on civic responsibility.
This is coming from a kid who was labeled as a “gifted and talented” student in 1st grade and asked if I wanted to go to school somewhere else where they pushed students to learn more than other students who were “incapable” of learning.
But let’s table this discussion of education and come back to it in another article. I’ll move on to talking about the influence of my local library and books in my life.
From kindergarten to now, I have always been addicted to books. I have always felt the need to have a book with me for down time so that I can read something, whether it is to learn or for entertainment purposes. Literature and non-fiction have earned an importance in my life that is unordinary for my generation.
I am pleased that around 2003 I began to read political and current affairs non-fiction books that most high school students never touch. I began with Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Dude, Where’s My Country?. I moved on to Al Franken’s books. I read Bill O’Reilly (yes, Bill O’Reilly). I read Everything That’s Bad is Good For You, Freakonomics, and The Republican War on Science.
Come my senior year, I was deep into political reading and was deeply into it because of my attachment to blogging and writing. I read my first Chomsky book, Hegemony or Survival, while working at a poll station in May 2006. I began to read books that questioned 9/11---books by David Ray Griffin, which are written quite well and make very concise arguments detailing the need for a further investigation. I also got into books detailing the history of American interventionism like William Blum’s Rogue State and Howard Zinn’s A Power Government Cannot Suppress.
In the way of literature, I read Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 and discovered I deeply love dystopian fiction. I have since then enjoyed It Can Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis and Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal. I’ve also read Junky by William Burroughs, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
I began to read works from the Sixties just recently and now I am reading books that dive deep into the inner workings of American foreign policy and a book on COINTELPRO.
This education and argument tradition was not imposed by my mother or father. I picked it up on my own. But they led me to the library. And had I never been taught the importance of reading, I would be consumed by video games and other technology today.
VIII. The Tradition of Discipline
“If parents don’t discipline, or they’re indecisive about it, their children won’t respect them.”
Ralph’s parents followed a system of reprimands that became systemically sharper and had more consequences with each reprimand. Sometimes it involved chores. Rarely did it involve spanking or beatings. Those type of measures “horrified” Ralph’s parents.
My parents, unlike Ralph’s, did not remain together and are now separated. The system of discipline broke down at some point in my childhood. I knew it. My mother knew it. And it created a Catch-22 for our family.
I didn’t have to listen to my parents anymore because I could get away with doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted when I was a teenager. My parents especially my mother knew that and thus it created a very foul atmosphere often where she would reject being around me or talking to me because she knew I was playing her like a fool.
