School Taught Us Stupid Shit

They can shove their recorder up their educated arseholes

School is supposed to prepare us for life. Well, in theory anyway. But trickle-down economics works in theory too and I’ve been sucking on the exhaust pipe of life for 42 years now — and I ain’t seen my trickle yet.

Economics doesn’t trickle gravitationally, and school didn’t prepare me for life.

If school did, the Dick and Jane books would’ve been different. They wouldn’t have been about making friends and learning roads. It would’ve been something like ‘See Dick do his taxes’. Or ‘See Jane take credit for Nancy’s work at BusinessBullshittery Incorporated’ (Jane’s a dick in this book).

Nope, school taught us some bullshit that I remembered for exactly 12 minutes after the test on it. Because school is learning things we don’t give a crap about, surrounded by people we gave less of a crap about — to work towards a future we don’t know if we’ll even have.

What sort of bullshittery did school teach us?

I dunno, how about that rope in gym class.

Why did we have to climb that god-damned, motherfucking, impossibly-vertical rope in gym class? I wasn’t training to become a firefighter. I’ve never climbed a rope post school. And these overcooked noodly arms couldn’t do it if I tried. Plus, I don’t need to climb ropes…I have boobs.

‘But Robin, it wasn’t all useless stuff!’

You’re right, it was a mixed bag of skills that ranged from mildly helpful to more useless than a marzipan dildo.

It taught us geography at least. So we’d know that the capital of Madagascar is Antananarivo, which is helpful since most of us will never be able to afford to go to all these countries they taught us about.

And school taught me fractions, which was semi-useful, I guess. It helps me with the thrice-a-year baking that I do. Although let’s be real here…it helped me buy drugs (the fun ones) better. How else would I have known what an eighth of weed was? Although it’s gone metric now and is sold in grams.

But trigonometry has been as useful as a screen door on a submarine. I’ve never, ever needed to calculate the angle of a triangle. Pfft, that doesn’t help me buy drugs. Although perhaps it helped me decide which half of the white Mitsubishi ecstasy tablet my friend and I were splitting was bigger.

But overall, the schooling system can isosceles triangulate deez nuts.

I have never once in my adult life used a protractor. You know what they didn’t teach us about but should’ve — the speculum. Now that’s a device that a heads-up would’ve been nice to have.

I super duper appreciate learning about the Pythagorean theorem though. It’s really handy that I can drone out “the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides” like I’m a chanting enchanted monk. But not sure that’s going to help me figure out what to do when AI replaces my job. And all the jobs.

Although perhaps school wasted time teaching the quadratic formula to us kids in the corner, eating paste.

Fractals were a pretty lesson, but also useless. While I was watching that one Windows 3.1 Mandelbrot screensaver while tripping on LSD, I really didn’t need to know the math behind it.

We had archery in gym class at my school. Why, is it because you were preparing us for the real world — which is the Hunger Games but with corporate ladders?

My odds of hitting a moving target with a bow and arrow are practically nil. You might as well have taught me something useful, like how to escape a polar bear, or how to get this murderous Canada goose (aka cobra chicken) to move out of my yard.

Learning the periodic table was useful, well, if I could remember it. It helps us understand which rare earth elements old asshats in power are killing us over.

School taught us about the water cycle. I’m not sure how handy that will be when it changes due to global warming, and instead of rain, the clouds will just shoot us with radiation bolts instead. Perhaps you could’ve taught some of that to the people in power, going full steam ahead while we boil like science-class frogs.

My education didn’t teach me how to pay taxes, or balance a checkbook. Although fair dinkum on the checkbook thing, I haven’t used one of those in decades. But taxes, that would’ve been helpful. They didn’t teach us how to do taxes though — nope, no point in that. Thanks for the parallelogram lessons, it’s super helpful during parallellelogram season.

Any financial literacy really would’ve been helpful. But I guess they can’t do that, because we can’t all be mega-yacht-owning, penis spaceship-building, douche-level rich. After all, where would we put all the yachts and private jets?

Whilst I appreciate you teaching me how to make a tabletop volcano, I’ve never used that. Couldn’t you have taught me something useful, like that bleach and acetone make chloroform? Or the secondary lesson one must learn the hard way, that if improperly stored, chloroform will bite you in the ass.

On the bright side, I know how to use an abacus. So now I can count down my march towards death and taxes with it in a tactile and rhythmic fashion.

I appreciate school teaching me that some clouds are cumulonimbus and others are nimbostratus. Oh, wait, I have an app on my phone that tells me when it’s going to rain, and all I really care about is whether I need an umbrella or can pop on a bikini and go tanning.

School taught me that the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Gee, thanks. But maybe teach me how electricity stays in the wall instead.

I’ve never used the lesson about how to grow a potato from another potato. It would’ve been more helpful if they showed us how to turn a potato into vodka. Or better yet, how to grow white truffles since I can buy a bag of potatoes for $4, but white truffles sell for $1,000 a pound.

School also taught me how to wire up a potato to create a battery circuit. But that fact has been shockingly unhelpful when I’m trying to charge my phone at the airport.

Here in Canada we memorized French conjugation tables, but didn’t learn how to form a useful sentence. I’ve never had to ask anyone where the bibliothèque is. They also taught us French from France. That was real helpful when I went to Montreal and didn’t know what the tâbárnak they were saying.

Schools, you can shove your papier mâché up your ârsés. Well, unless I can sell papier mâché artwork on Etsy, once AI replaces my job. Although I suspect the only thing I’ll be selling worth cash will be foot pics or used panties.

Having cursive writing shoved down my throat was handy, even though it was the bane of my left-handed existence. At least now, we elders have a secret code to write in.

And finally…my biggest gripe about the bullshittery we learned in school — the recorder.

Le sigh, the recorder — for fucks sake, why? You thought it would be great for us to learn the missing link between noise and sound, coupled with just enough nails-on-a-chalkboard undertones to drive our parents insane.

Schools can shove their recorders up their Hot Cross Buns.

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Overall, school is a weird process. Preschool prepares you for elementary; elementary prepares you for middle school; middle school preps you for high school. High school should theoretically prepare you for college and or life, but somehow does neither. Not that anything could prepare us for a life of indentured servitude and debt to people in invisible monetary castles. It was nice of them to teach us about the perils of slavery though, while preparing us to be ones.

“You don’t appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life.” ~Emo Philips

Perhaps school was less about preparing us for life and more about preparing us to be corporate shills propping up the machine. Schools were busy teaching children to follow instructions, as our creativity faded and our memorization skills took over.

Or maybe it was just about getting us out of the house for long enough that parents didn’t end up filling up insane asylums.

‘But Robin, school taught you how to write!’

This is true. And now I have a thriving career that keeps me playing peekaboo with the poverty line. So if there’s a lesson here, I guess it’s to pay more attention in math and computer class. Or memorize that book about how Nancy gets Jane to do her work for her.

School didn’t prepare me for life, although I’m not sure anything could’ve. Life kinda just comes at you, like an angry water buffalo. But perhaps if they’d taught us all how to leverage debt and tax loopholes like the uber-rich, we could kill the system that holds us all down. Just a thought.

Now I’m off to play my recorder at Carnegie Hall, then afterwards win a big cash prize in a competitive rope-climbing contest. Then I’ll take a nap, because that lesson from preschool is the one that stuck with me the most.

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