the truth about bean bags
Compared to the twenty or so years I’ve spent in college – I’m rounding up, by the way – I consider my pre-University education to be a complete waste of time. This attitude may stem from the fact that I was enrolled in Catholic schools, where, instead of teaching me anything worthwhile, the faculty spent most of their time trying to impart Christian values that penetrated me like water off the back of some kind of heathen duck-like monster. “Thou shalt not what?” I would often ask distractedly, while drawing tank versus gorilla battles in the margins of my notebook. Then I would try to find the parts in The Bible with whores and dragons where things go all creative-writing-on-a bender. What an ending!

My case against Catholic schooling may be tarnished a bit since I do have the appropriate amount of irrational post-Catholic school rage. I think it comes from the years spent in those hallowed halls, which have dulled me to the Great American Male Fetish: girls in Catholic High School uniforms -- yes, we’re disgusting. But, in a rare occurrence, this isn’t about short plaid skirts and nubile gams. This is about me wasting the precious years of my youth learning quadratic equations and state capitals when I could have been wasting those years at home doing something more entertaining, like playing with the stove.

One thing’s certain though; despite being forced to sit in uncomfortable chairs for thousands of hours during my misguided youth, I learned nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The reason I haven’t retained any pre-College knowledge is that its usefulness is marginal at best. Does anyone remember having to learn cursive writing? When it was introduced to me in the second grade, it was the first of many times teachers tried to scare the students shitless. Having already mastered the regular alphabet, we were introduced to a new loopy version where the M’s had one hump too many and chaos was the only natural law. We were told the adult world operated on cursive, and I imagined those still using the old “block letters” in the future would be forced to live in ghettos while the Cursivites hunted them for sport. Yet, as an adult, I have managed to forget most of the cursive teachers so desperately tried to have me carve on page after page of their horrible blue-dotted and yellowed paper. This lack of cursive is one of the few things that society doesn’t judge me on, which I’m glad for since – even at gunpoint - I can’t even imagine what a cursive Q looks like. No one does – and if someone claims to know, you can assume that you’re talking to a lying bastard.

The useless knowledge I was unable to retain extends to the gymnasium as well. With the prevalence of tiny, flat scooters and bean bags in the gym class of my childhood, I assumed that we were learning valuable skills for the job market of the future. I dreamed of an adulthood where, every morning, I would leave my mansion and million-dollar wife to travel to the video game factory on my tiny scooter. As I sailed off to work, the streets would be littered with bean bags which I would have to avoid for points. Then, when I got to work, my boss would throw bean bags across the floor at the employees, and the one to get hit with the least amount of them during the day would win a trip to Disneyland. Sadly, this vision came from ignorance; having my fingers run over by creaky plastic scooters and getting hit on the legs with filthy old beanbags was just a way to keep us students from turning into fatties. I’m still waiting for army-surplus parachute lifting to become an Olympic event, since it was one of the few things I was good at; I was a parachute-lifting dynamo.

As I mentioned before, faith was something that was applied to me like a thin misting of talcum powder, but Church went hand-in-hand with State as I learned – and forgot – patriotism. Every morning we had to pledge allegiance to the flag, but after the word “flag,” the pledge ceased to become words. No one bothered to explain to me what the rest of the stodgy, 19th Century poetry meant, so I had to learn it phonetically. It was many years after learning the pledge that I actually found out not only was it in English, but the words in it also had meaning and the pledge would not grant me the powers of invisibility.

I dealt with prayers in the same way, except the language was cranked back two more centuries, taking the Wayback Machine all the way to the time of the King James Bible. I didn’t know who “Art” was, but I was told he was in Heaven and probably be absent that day. For the rest of the Lord’s Prayer, I would just moan in the rhythm and pitch of the rest of the class, until “amen” signaled that it was time to speak English again. For all I knew, I could have been chanting to Satan, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing as Satan-worship would have merited much cooler school uniforms.

Education majors, this goes out to you. I have outlined the most useless parts of my schooling, and I hope that you avoid teaching students the things the future has no use for. Instead, I recommend instructing them about living in an adult world just on the verge of the apocalypse, which they will no doubt be a part of. When they are urban warriors, swinging chains, wearing human skulls around their necks, and riding armored SUVs through the charred remains of cities, they’ll thank you for the important life lessons you’ve taught them. If you do a poor job, they’ll no doubt become part of the new wave of human slavery whose knowledge of bean bags and cursive taught them nothing about the real world. Do you want to be responsible for that?