School vs Reality

Wen I was growing up, I had one very good teacher in fourth grade who used to, on occasion, tell us things that students of other teachers might not get to hear.  She was an honest young teacher... perhaps honest to a fault.  Perhaps she had Asperger syndrome?

Anyway, this teacher would tell us from time to time that she was teaching us how life is supposed to be, not how it really is.  That would come up from time to time when one of us questioned why something occurred in the news that didn't seem to be in violation of the American principals the school directed her to teach us.

From time to time, this teacher would complain about how the school wouldn't let her teach us the things she had learned.  On one occasion, she told us about a little acid trip, but said it was NoDoz that caused the unusual visions she described.  She warned us not to take NoDoz.

Being that this was a very conservative school in East Texas, this teacher was pretty brave to try to teach us about many of the things she did.  The point of me telling you this is that most of the students didn't catch that she was teaching us how things "should" be and not how they really were. 

I often pondered what this teacher had said.  I often pondered her.  Did I say she was hot?  I pondered some of the occasional things that she threw out from her college studies that were so different from the God Bless America, bless our troops, support the war in Viet Nam rah rah propaganda that we were being taught.  She didn't slip often, but I was quite aware when she did.  Those things always stuck in the back of my mind and never really came to the forefront until I got into college myself, then all the things she had said came together.

I remember when the end of the school year came.  I had grown quite fond of her.  I was genuinely sad when I had to go on to the next grade.  I was too young, then, but I would have loved to have... oh never mind.

Some of my school mates who didn't go on to college never understood that the world wasn't the way they were taught in grade school.  Some of them, to this day, haven't looked any farther than "all the crap they learned in high school" to paraphrase a line from Paul Simon's "Kodachrome."

What is the problem with this?  They want to enforce those unrealistic "should bes" on us by law and by force.  They'll scream about being American, but don't think of what liberty and justice really is.  They want everyone to do things their way so they can all have the kind of "liberty" THEY want and spout that if you don't like their idea of "liberty," then you should leave.  It's sort of like they haven't graduated from the kindergarten of life.