When I was young, I was a golden child. I was happy, playful, and possessed a love of learning. The course was set for an effervescent man of integrity and destiny to emerge. My life was a garden of wonder, freedom, and insightful naivety. And then they incarcerated me for having too beautiful a soul, and called it my education. Years of factory-like traumatic lessons wore down my curiosity, my intelligence, and my free spirit, as per the specifications of the cold masters of mechanistic hegemony. They "taught" me to be a cookie-cutter cog in the machine, showing me how to grow a plant, use my creativity, read, write, and do maths.
The teachers — those craven, malicious servants of the regime — would ask questions only when they served to humiliate their fragile pupils. "What do you want to be when you grow up?", one asked me during a class, knowing full well that a child could not hope to produce a credible answer at that age.
"I want to be happy", I retorted, rejecting the chains of domination they tried to put on me.
"I don't think you understand the question," the jaded devil sneered.
"I don't think you understand life, maan," I told him, in what might well be a revisionist, fact-shy remembering of the past. It turned out that I didn't actually understand the question and needed to attend some remedial lessons.
It didn't matter though, as those sons of bitches couldn't take away my crayons. It took a great effort maintaining that freedom, as I was plagued by persistent urges to shove the various colours into my orifices, which would have resulted in me being deprived them. Colouring things in was my one salvation in primary school. One day, the barren, dry witch who taught us handed out a colouring-in picture of all the various cultures of the world. I relished such an image, and enthusiastically coloured all their complexions all the colours of the rainbow.
"People don't look like that," she said patronisingly, from her withered, loveless lips. I paused with bemusement, pulling my head back from my picture.
"Everything must seem grey in your world, you dull cunt."
Those Nazis interrogated me for ages about where I learned those words from, and "not from this brain drain" wasn't a satisfactory answer.
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| The child Fairflower before and after three weeks of classes. |
As the years of my sentence laboured on, the teaching got worse. My grades dropped steadily. No standardised test could accurately gauge my unique abilities: orange cordial palate, imagination, my sense of fun. All my strengths were things that are difficult to assess (much like my appreciation of wine and art are now). I came home one day with a letter from my principal, which I was told should only be read by my mother. As she read it, tears began to swell in her eyes.
"What's wrong, mama? Did I do bad?", I asked.
"No," she said bravely, wiping her tears away, "it says you're a brilliant student. A genius, who needs to be held back a level to give the other students a chance."
"Really?"
"Yes, it's the onions that are making me cry."
I embraced her. "Oh, that's great, mama."
It took me years to realise that she had lied, and that it actually had informed her that I was "mentally deficient". I pieced together the deception over the years. All the clues were there: the fact I was held back a year and still struggled; the fact I was held back a year; the fact that there were no onions in the kitchen that day; the fact that I had read the letter before she did.
The biggest clue was probably the "you are dense and will amount to nothing" comments that came often from even the most encouraging teachers. How wrong they turned out to be. Unless, by "nothing", they meant drifting aimlessly into TEFL teaching, in which case they were right.
By secondary school, I felt school was enslavement with no hope of escape. I had become so lackadaisical and insolent, and I often had to stay back for detention, making my day longer. My only consolation was poetry. When they did finally decide to suspend me for bad behaviour, it was poetry that softened the blow. As I walked into class to pick up my bag and jacket, my fellow students stood up on their desks, one by one, and recited, "O Captain! My Captain!", as a mawkish, 1980s movie soundtrack seemed to fill the air. The authoritarians clamped down hard on rebellious actions after that, claiming that the fall Clarkey had taken while trying to stand on his desk caused his concussion. We all knew he was just a bit dopey. Towards the end of sixth year, I finally felt the chains weaken. I initiated an impromptu flashmob, where we all progressively joined in singing 'Let the Sunshine In' by The 5th Dimension. We marched right out the front door, as the principal heckled at us to return to our class.
"Order! Order!", he yelped, "You must stay under the crushing weight of our dominion. It's for your own good!"
We headed to the park, where we sat around in circles, smoking, laughing, and picking flowers. We discussed all the important things in life: video games, football, wanking, how to score some booze, TV shows, girls we'd like to bang, and the blatant preferability of an anarchic society.
Let me tell you happily that it hasn't done me any harm. I was a flower child during those wondrous days of youth. And I still am. This bird finally flown from his cage. If you feel trapped in your life, particularly if you are still in school, rest assured that you are sane and they are the crazy ones. Don't allow them to oppress you with their rote learning, thought control, bullshit religion lessons, or persistent assessment. Any adult will tell you that retaining information and abstract thinking are of no value on the real world. Like me, all you need is your intuition. In time, you'll learn to develop your own moral compass and learn your own path, like I did. A medical compass and a legal compass might be necessary too if you want to avoid anything resembling academic learning for the rest of your life, like me. It can be difficult sometimes, but since I walked out of that school gate for the last time, at the age of twenty-two, I have had no regrets.
