Education Vs. "The Real Stuff"

Skipping classes on gloriously sunny afternoons, brazen enough to simply walk off the campus. Hey, I was white, Caucasian , or “other” on the list and that was enough to be out of sight of the roaming go-carts driven by the hawk-eyed campus staff.

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Chicken shit was not my game. Smoking the green and destructing brain cells to “broaden my senses” was a damn waste of living. Instead, I’d head off to the rich neighborhoods of town, park it, and stroll down the sidewalks looking to relate with any being encountered, be it strangers, rabbits, or squirrels.

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I wasn’t going to miss a moment of this freedom of youth. A developing mind topped a developing bosom, and out to strut this stuff, I was bound. Class, who needed it? I had the real life at my fingertips catching soft petals from the falling apple blossoms and tangible visualizations of grandiose architecture.

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Leisure was learning. Classrooms were prison. Why take fieldtrips as young children just to yearn for it in high school? This conspiracy was not to overcome my broadening senses. School is the institute of education, they’d say, but no further than the fences that surrounded this jail would one have to look to feel inspired and educated by our own damn resources. Resources of nature in terms of transcendentalism, resources of social interactions in terms of humanity and transaction. Resources that were enough to educate the students, who sat in their assigned seats and babbled away as the “teacher” talked of Hecate, the goddess of the crossroads, Descartes, the first philosopher to provide a framework of the philosophy of natural sciences, and the animal/ insect kingdom that frolicked closely nearby in the forests, beaches, and fields of our world.