School the prison, university, camel shit, and saving your brain

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            School, as I see now, was an absolute waste of time for me. I did all right and everything. I was a fine, unrebellious automaton. Never questioned why I had to be locked in prison for eight hours a day and made to listen to teachers who didn’t want to teach, surrounded by students who didn’t want to learn. But it wasn’t until years afterward- when I recognized what they had done to me, with their idiotic subjects and propagandizing- that I began to declare that if I had had any guts back then, that the day I turned sixteen- which is the legal age you’re allowed to end the brutalization and begin the healing- I would have blown my nose into my school notebook, walked out of the stockade, and never looked back.

            As it was I was too unconscious, too afraid, too believing in the lie to even consider such a move. I even tortured myself for another six years, willingly attending university under the false guidance that real knowledge began there- that high school had merely been necessary preparation in order to be capable of partaking in the rigours of wisdom. What a load of camel shit.

            A few years after my tardy exodus, I even considered filing suit against the government for ‘breach of personal freedom’, because it was counter to their law to not have your brain mulched like everyone else’s; whether you chose a local penitentiary, correspondence, or home schooling, you still had to do your time, because to be truant from the brain-washing was to be a threat to the state, since there existed the odd chance that you might then be untainted enough to see through the hocus-pocus and crimes of the establishment’s conventions.

***

These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.