Alright, so what does all this have to do with Edward Snowden?
Ed hated high school; he saw no lessons in democracy. He looked for ways to get around the routines and requirements that often seemed to him arbitrary, shallow and hackable. He observed:
Mr. Martin made the rules for US history, Ms. Evans made the rules for English, Mr. Sweeney made the rules for science, Mr. Stockton made the rules for math, and all of those teachers constantly changed those rules to benefit themselves and maximize their power. (page 41)
He hated these tyrants and their authoritarian hypocrisy. F*ck 'em.
In fact, for his history class he studied the grading system and determined the formula for what class requirements needed to be met in order to pass, which was all he was interested in. (We'll leave aside for now the irony of Ed's indifference to history.) At the time, he told himself,
What all of those numbers told me was that if I didn't do any homework but aced everything else, Td wind up with a cumulative grade of 85, a B. If I didn't do any homework or write any term papers but aced everything else. I'd wind up with a cumulative grade of 70, a C-minus. The 10 percent that was class participation would be my buffer. Even if the teacher gave me a zero in that-if they interpreted my participation as disruption-I could still manage a 65, a D- minus. I'd still pass. (page 42)
Damn, imagine figuring out that you needn't worry about homework or the term paper to pass.
But Ed passed the information around to other classroom Bolsheviks and it got back to his teacher, Mr. Martin, who pulled him aside, congratulated him on his brilliance, then proceeded to change the syllabus, eliminating the loopholes. Mr. Martin admonished him further, saying such behavior would be noted and could go on his "permanent record" for others to see years later as an indicator of his sneaky waywardness.
Not long after, Ed said, F*ck high school. He didn't need the aggravation. Ed never finished high school; he dropped out. In a tactic that is both confusing and clever, he saw that he could attend classes at a community college, and study for his General Educational Development degree (GED), which all states have as an alternative way of earning an equivalent and acknowledged high school degree. Ed writes,
I remember leaving the exam feeling lighter than ever, having satisfied the two years of schooling that I still owed to the state just by taking a two-day exam. It felt like a hack, but it was more than that. It was me staying true to my word.
Fuckin' eh. Ed beat the system of tyrants and mindless authoritarians. Good on 'im.
Ed's legally getting around the bullshit involved in the way things work continued in adulthood. In the memoir, he refers to himself as a systems engineer. And seemed proud of it. Putting out to the reader that he had a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) qualification. At this point of the reading, I started laughing my ass off. Because I'd said fung-goo to high school after year 10, too, and obtained my two-day exam-driven high school equivalence, which allowed me to sit the SAT, whose grades got me into university, where I laughed through it and ended up graduating summa cum laude. Of course, I dropped out of Groton School, an elite boarding school, so it was a bit different than leaving behind a public system.
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