Excerpted from No More Prisons by William Upski Wimsatt.  Brooklyn, New York: Soft Skull Press, 1999.

 

How to Overcome Your Addiction to School

 

SCHOOLAHOLICS ANONYMOUS

 

Are you a young person who’s still in school?

            Then I have a dare for you.

            No, let’s not call it a dare—we don’t want to scare your parents.

            Let’s call it a sociology experiment.

            When you go in to school on Monday, ask all your teachers to name one thing they learned in school that they still use that they couldn’t have learned on their own

            Be polite. Say, “Excuse me Ms. Jones but if school is so important, can you please name one thing you learned in school that you couldn’t have learned on your own?”

            You should ask all adults this question.

            It should be interesting to see what they come up with.

            Because if they do come up with something, then the next question is, why couldn’t they learn it on their own? Weren’t they resourceful enough? Did they have problems with self-motivation? And then the next question is, What in the hell are they doing teaching you? And, why in hell are you listening? Isn’t there something better you could be doing with your time? And if there is, then what in the hell are you still doing in school?

            I have been asking myself this question since I was about ten. But by the time I finally decided once and for all to quit school I was already halfway through college. What possessed me to stay in school for ten extra years when I knew I had better things to do?

            It’s because school is like a drug. Okay when used in moderation but too much of it can cause damaging side effects, including passivity, dullness, emo­tional dependency, rebelliousness, anti-social behavior, mood swings, disorien­tation, impaired judgment, eating disorders, depression, self-hatred, and dislike of learning.  Except that school is even more dangerous than conventional drugs because it is a socially acceptable addiction forced onto children too young to realize they have any other choice.  School serves as a “gateway drug” to other kinds of addictions such as alcoholism, smoking, sex addiction, delin­quency, materialism, workaholism, heroin, cocaine and coffee. There needs to be a Surgeon General’s warning on schools the same way they have it on cig­arettes.

            Somebody needs to start up Schoolaholics Anonymous.  I wish there had been a Schoolaholics Anonymous chapter in my school!

            Hello.

            My name is Billy. I am psychologically addicted to school.

            Up until 6th grade, I loved my teachers and I loved school. I was interest­ed in everything. I loved math and science and reading and social studies. By the end of 6th grade, I hated math and science and social studies. I was bored in all my classes. I thought I was stupid. I thought my teachers were idiots. And I had lost all interest in reading. I couldn’t even write a simple article for the school newspaper. The only things I was interested in were girls, adventure, and sneaking around the city writing graffiti.

            In 10th grade I got a job in a library shelving magazines and books. I began reading about graffiti, which was the only subject I still had much interest in. That got me back into reading again and now I am one of those lucky people who actually makes a living as a writer. I have tried to quit school three times. I worked odd jobs, did internships, started a small business, won research grants and awards as a professional journalist, threw parties, did grassroots organiz­ing, edited a newspaper and a book, published another book, organized a con­ference of five hundred people, ran a youth center, made friends in almost every neighborhood in my hometown Chicago and hitchhiked around the country twice to every major city except Dallas. I had a life. I did not need school. But school still had this strange grip on me. I was experiencing withdrawal.

 

THE UNIVERSITY OF PLANET EARTH

 

Part of the trap is that I was now in college. Everyone knows high school is a waste of time but college is considered a great privilege. I loved college. I felt at home there. I had free food, my own room, no responsibilities. My tuition was even free because my Dad’s a professor. It would be stupid for me to quit now. I’d be throwing away privileges, not just free tuition but the acceptance of my family, future employers, and mates. And my Jewish grandmother. What in the hell was I supposed to tell her?

            Never mind that she, the least “educated” member of our family, has become the most financially successful. Never mind that my other most “suc­cessful” relative—William Horberg, a big-time Hollywood producer (Sliding Doors, In Search of Bobby Fisher)—is also a college dropout.

            In my grandmother’s mind, the only two respectable things a young per­son can do is work or go to school. There is no third alternative. There’s no such thing as “I learn on my own, find my own teachers, create my own work.” Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightengale, Frank Lloyd Wright, Malcolm X, Joan of Arc and Benjamin Franklin are from a different universe. They are from History—things were different back then. And how dare you imply you’re in a category with them?

            To me, they were just people who lived as they believed, did what they loved, faced up to the challenges of their time, and happened to become famous. Great and terrible things would happen in my lifetime also. Was I prepared to do my part?

            When I was 14, my hero was a rapper named KRS-One who bad dropped out of 8th grade and educated himself. When I informed my parents that I intended to do the same, they told me it was illegal, and they would send me to an all boys military school if I tried. Having spent my life in school where everything is spoon-fed, I was not even resourceful enough to find out that they were wrong. And in retrospect, maybe I was a little bit scared. Okay, I was very scared. But as I became more resourceful, and learned about the possibilities available to me, I gained confidence to take my education into my own hands.  Self-education is an upward spiral that way. I had already found a love of mag­azines, an ease with talking to strangers, and the essential ingredient of any self-education — the habit of asking questions. So one summer day three years ago, I was in a little bookstore in Portland, Oregon called Reading Frenzy and I asked the owner, Chloe Eudaly, what her favorite books were.

            She didn’t even have to think about it.

            “That one!” she said. She pointed to a self-published book with crude red and green illustrations. Its title? The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn.

            “I m not a teenager, was my first thought, and I already have a real life and education, thanks anyway (I was preparing to enter my Junior year of col­lege—which I loved—and I already knew how to educate myself outside of school.) Besides, if Grace Llewellyn was so self-educated, how come her book looked so amateurish and why hadn’t I heard of it before — why hadn’t she educated herself in design and marketing? In retrospect, maybe I was a little bit threatened. Okay, I was very threatened. But I bought the book anyway as a gift for a friend.

            I started reading it and the gift was to me—I was really moved and when, I returned to college in the fall, it felt like coasting. I had big plans and the things I needed most there were no classes for. Hello? There are no sex class­es.  No friendship classes.  No classes on how to navigate a bureaucracy, build an organization, raise money, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what was important to me. Not knowing how to do these things is what mess people up in life, not whether they know Algebra or can analyze literature.

            What if the way some of us learn best is the opposite of the way we were taught to learn in school? And what if the things you most want to do in life aren’t considered a career? There’s no career called walking around the street helping homeless people. You have to get a job at a social service agency where you’ll have to spend most of your time faxing, filling out forms and applying for grants. That’s a crime. That’s the indirect, bureaucratic, unsatisfying, inef­fective, busy work way of living taught to us in school.  Self-education, in con­trast, is direct, pertinent, powerful, and fun. I wanted a self-education that freed up my imagination to see how things could be changed.

            I didn’t want to write any more papers proving I could read two books and compare them. I wanted to make giant charts to compare everything that mattered to me.

            I didn’t want to memorize a bunch of facts and forget them. I wanted to know facts I could use and organize them like an almanac in a way I could whip out on any fool who tried to test me.

            I didn’t want to speed through assigned texts. I wanted to read some care­fully, others not at all.

            I didn’t want to rush my diary. I wanted to write down everything impor­tant and organize it like a bible for instant consultation.

            I didn’t want to hear about amazing people. I wanted to meet them, apprentice with them, be their partner.

            I didn’t want to sit in classrooms. I wanted to see the world.

            I looked at my friends who graduated college. Most of them are paying off debts now, riding the conveyor belt into graduate school, and selecting their mates from unnecessarily narrow pools. They are mid-life crises waiting to happen. Or maybe they won’t even have mid-life crises. Maybe they’ll just get stuck. Geniuses at following directions, they have little direction of their own. They’re good at fitting into structures but they have little idea how to change one. They may be brilliant in their narrow fields, but they’re kind of dim about the big picture. Some of them feel their narrow field is the big picture. They have no idea whether they’d be happier doing something else.

            I prefer to have my mid-life crises now—early and often. I quit college in the middle of my Junior year and enrolled as a student at The University of Planet Earth, the world’s oldest and largest educational institution. It has bil­lions of professors, tens of millions of books, and unlimited course offerings. Tuition is free. There are no degrees and no one ever graduates.

            Students pose their own questions and design their own curriculum.

            Here is my question:

            How can I commit the most good and the least evil in my lifetime?

            Here is my curriculum:

            “Live in a different place every year: D.C., Oakland, New York, L.A., a farm, and somewhere in the South. Play a different sport every day of the week, preferably with a different ethnic group: Basketball with blacks, martial arts with Chinese, capoeira with Brazilians, soccer with some of everyone, ten­nis with WASPs, etc. Every Sunday attend a different place of worship. Every day get to know someone new. Volunteer, attend lectures, talk to strangers on the street. Seek out hundreds of role models and mentors. The rest of the time, go to the library, read whatever I want, take notes and make charts. Create my own personal bible, almanac and telephone book. For discipline, live in high-crime neighborhoods. That ought to keep a gun to my head. Save up enough to travel to a different continent each year; otherwise, work as little as possi­ble. Do that for five years. That will be my freshman survey course. Then I’ll have a better idea of what to do as a sophomore.”

            I haven’t followed my curriculum exactly. I keep changing it as opportu­nities arise. I had to scale back some of my goals because I needed to make money. My parents wouldn’t use college money to help me educate myself and I got depressed for a while because I felt like they had no faith in me or my decisions in life. But self-education is the all-purpose fixer.  It really can get you out of anything and into anything else.  Recently, I researched my way into a dream job where I’ll be paid to do almost exactly what I planned to do any­way — so I have to say that so far my self-education is going pretty well. My only regret is that 1 didn’t start earlier.

            Eventually, I’m gonna make a living as a public interest consultant. You say you’ve never heard of a “public interest consultant”? Oh, you will. I’m gonna be one. You’re gonna be able to come to me in about five years. If you want to turn your nose up at me because I don’t have a college degree—fine, your loss. I’m gonna know everything, and more importantly, everyone. Maybe someday I’ll regret quitting school. Maybe I started too late. Maybe I won’t be a good enough consultant and maybe my plans won’t fly. But I have to try. As Grace Llewellyn writes, “The only alternative to making mistakes is for someone else to make all your decisions for you, in which case you will make their mistakes instead of your own.”