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Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone has the same image or experience of school. I see School as a day care for children to allow parents to work during the day, with some inefficient learning on the side. It's very convenient, but not the only option.

Personally I learned nothing (edit: not much) in school, was bullied, it was an awful experience and all I remember is watching the clock all day waiting for it to pass while daydreaming. Elementary school was like one year to learn to make additions, one year multiplication, for how many hours in school? To finally get a lot of children struggling to read in 6th grade. Middle school was more or less the same for me. I feel like I was the subject of an ideology too.

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I was similarly bullied through school and would easily get bored with the ease of the content.

I think partly because I never had the fine tuned sense of social interaction that many are naturally blessed with and paired with a dangerous tendency to let pigheaded curiosity be a guiding principle.

But, the the stuff it has taught me is indispensable. It was never taught explicitly, but without school I would have grown up completely oblivious of the invisible walls, thorns and highways that inhabit the society we live in.

Like if you want to infiltrate into a rebel base as a spy, you would want to spend a lot of time learning their mannerisms and adopting a persona. School helped me tremendously in fitting in, because my type of person would have certainly ended up an outcast in this society, if I was to be homeschooled.

Yes that's pretty much the question I'm trying to answer, and how outside activities with other kids could maybe replace that aspect of school.

Damn, Im sorry for your loss. School, like university, is not just about being looked after by more competent people. Its a place where you not only learn academic disciplines but also begin to understand how the real world works - social hierachies, networking and building relationships etc etc. To an extent, its what you make of it.

I don't question it's essential to learn what you point out, but that school as it exists and is organized now is maybe not the best, or at least the only way fit-all approach for education + socializing. On the education I'm sure it's not. On the socializing part I clearly didn't make much of it but maybe I'm lightly on the spectrum so it didn't help.

I read this essay a few years ago and it really resonated, it does obviously a way better job at putting my feeling into words: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Interesting essay. Not to pry, but how old are you? pg went to high school in the 80s, and as someone who attended more recently, most of his points read like artifacts of the time--something with more resemblance to a John Hughes movie than real life.

Are you really certain that you weren't one of the people who actually was part of the privileged clique?

My small town school had instances of missing teeth, broken jaws, one kid beaten far enough to require hospitalization for 2 weeks, etc. 10 years later, the popular kids say that there was no bullying and it was all intended in good fun. My therapist didn't even believe me at first when I discussed the things that were going on at my school, but luckily I do have some reminders of those times on visible places.

I'm 100% sure I fall under "nerd" as pg uses it--if you'd asked a random student in my year to name a nerd, it would've been me--and that's why I have trouble connecting with these stories. Neither I or my Academic Decathlon/programming/D&D friend group encountered that level of bullying. Cliques were there, but most people were in more than one, so the lines weren't very stark.

Your school sounds awful, I'm sorry. I went to a pretty diverse school with >2000 students, so there was some violence, but it was either mutual or gang-related. Petty teenager dickishness existed, but nothing like the kind of Stephen King bullies you describe. As far as I know, at least.

I admit I could've been oblivious, but for that to be possible already indicates a friendlier environment than these descriptions.

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