Is secondary school a waste of time?

I guess it all shows that everyone's experience is different.  My niece's 14-year-old lad, for instance, is having a whale of a time at school.  He's academically bright, he's good at games, he's popular with his peers and his teachers.  He's already being seen as university material, if he so chooses that route. He's even good musically, and is hoping to start a band with school mates.  He'll only ever consider his school days to have been great, worthwhile, positive, and an excellent foundation for his future life.

Personally, I envy anyone who can say that their schooldays were the best days of their life.  Or even that they found school to be a worthwhile experience.  I cannot emphasise enough, though, how much that was the opposite for me.  It started not in secondary school, but in primary school.  I was bright as a kid.  I could read by the time I started primary, and was way ahead of the others in my first year.  It was after that that it started to go wrong.  At secondary, it got much worse.  Bullying, exclusion, a sense of absolute detachment and alienation from everything around me.  It was the roots of a dysphoria that has haunted me ever since.  There was absolutely nothing good, positive or worthwhile about it.  Being taught with others merely highlighted my inadequacy, and sense of being a freak and a failure.  I used to live in fear of the place, cry myself to sleep at night, develop all sorts of strategies (phantom illnesses, etc) to avoid going in - or to avoid others if I had no choice but to go in, which was generally the case. I couldn't concentrate on lessons because I was full of fear and anxiety.  My very final day came just as the exams were starting, somewhere near my 16th birthday.  I was punched in the face in the playground - a punch that shattered my right cheekbone, sending a jagged edge of bone into my right eye socket and almost rupturing my eye.  Until I could have the corrective operation, my eye was permanently displaced at an upwards angle, so that I couldn't see straight.  My parents were adamant from that day forwards: I wasn't going back.  The sense of relief was overwhelming.  I came out of hospital at 16, without any qualifications at all, and before I started my first job I had three months of total and absolute freedom.  I spent my days wandering over the fields near our home, reveling in my safety and 'aloneness' at last.

If I had the power, I'd excise that entire ten-year school period from my life forever.  If I was offered a drug that would enable me to forget everything about school, I'd take it without a second thought.  Sure, I've encountered other difficulties in my life - including workplace bullying, which left me wrecked emotionally and psychologically.  This was quite likely because of my earlier experiences.  Any 'good' that might have accrued from being at school was massively counterbalanced with the lifelong trauma it left me with.  Therapy has improved it, but not eradicated it.  One of the reasons that I haven't had children is that I wouldn't want them to go through what I went through - even though their experiences might be completely different.  Yes, I was clearly resilient enough to get through it.  But I don't really call it resilience, given the legacy of it I still suffer.  And is it really a good way to make someone resilient, anyway?  If so, why don't we treat everyone and everything with cruelty and callousness?  With disdain?  With a punch in the face now and then, to toughen them up?

We fall over ourselves for our children in society.  We protect them, spoil them, give them the world, idolise them.  Naturally, of course.  They're vulnerable members of society, and they're our loved-ones and our future.  But my experience of them, when I was one myself, is that they can be especially cruel, uncaring and sadistic creatures: human nature at its rawest and most venal.  That won't be a popular view, but there it is.  I don't say I don't like children, because I do.  Especially the ones who, like me, don't find childhood - specifically school days - very much fun at all.

I'm pretty much still a child myself, at heart.  I have a great sense of fun and mischief.  But school?  Forget it.  I'm so glad I never have to go near one of the places ever again.

I guess it all shows that everyone's experience is different.  My niece's 14-year-old lad, for instance, is having a whale of a time at school.  He's academically bright, he's good at games, he's popular with his peers and his teachers.  He's already being seen as university material, if he so chooses that route. He's even good musically, and is hoping to start a band with school mates.  He'll only ever consider his school days to have been great, worthwhile, positive, and an excellent foundation for his future life.

Personally, I envy anyone who can say that their schooldays were the best days of their life.  Or even that they found school to be a worthwhile experience.  I cannot emphasise enough, though, how much that was the opposite for me.  It started not in secondary school, but in primary school.  I was bright as a kid.  I could read by the time I started primary, and was way ahead of the others in my first year.  It was after that that it started to go wrong.  At secondary, it got much worse.  Bullying, exclusion, a sense of absolute detachment and alienation from everything around me.  It was the roots of a dysphoria that has haunted me ever since.  There was absolutely nothing good, positive or worthwhile about it.  Being taught with others merely highlighted my inadequacy, and sense of being a freak and a failure.  I used to live in fear of the place, cry myself to sleep at night, develop all sorts of strategies (phantom illnesses, etc) to avoid going in - or to avoid others if I had no choice but to go in, which was generally the case. I couldn't concentrate on lessons because I was full of fear and anxiety.  My very final day came just as the exams were starting, somewhere near my 16th birthday.  I was punched in the face in the playground - a punch that shattered my right cheekbone, sending a jagged edge of bone into my right eye socket and almost rupturing my eye.  Until I could have the corrective operation, my eye was permanently displaced at an upwards angle, so that I couldn't see straight.  My parents were adamant from that day forwards: I wasn't going back.  The sense of relief was overwhelming.  I came out of hospital at 16, without any qualifications at all, and before I started my first job I had three months of total and absolute freedom.  I spent my days wandering over the fields near our home, reveling in my safety and 'aloneness' at last.

If I had the power, I'd excise that entire ten-year school period from my life forever.  If I was offered a drug that would enable me to forget everything about school, I'd take it without a second thought.  Sure, I've encountered other difficulties in my life - including workplace bullying, which left me wrecked emotionally and psychologically.  This was quite likely because of my earlier experiences.  Any 'good' that might have accrued from being at school was massively counterbalanced with the lifelong trauma it left me with.  Therapy has improved it, but not eradicated it.  One of the reasons that I haven't had children is that I wouldn't want them to go through what I went through - even though their experiences might be completely different.  Yes, I was clearly resilient enough to get through it.  But I don't really call it resilience, given the legacy of it I still suffer.  And is it really a good way to make someone resilient, anyway?  If so, why don't we treat everyone and everything with cruelty and callousness?  With disdain?  With a punch in the face now and then, to toughen them up?

We fall over ourselves for our children in society.  We protect them, spoil them, give them the world, idolise them.  Naturally, of course.  They're vulnerable members of society, and they're our loved-ones and our future.  But my experience of them, when I was one myself, is that they can be especially cruel, uncaring and sadistic creatures: human nature at its rawest and most venal.  That won't be a popular view, but there it is.  I don't say I don't like children, because I do.  Especially the ones who, like me, don't find childhood - specifically school days - very much fun at all.

I'm pretty much still a child myself, at heart.  I have a great sense of fun and mischief.  But school?  Forget it.  I'm so glad I never have to go near one of the places ever again.