any tragedy, injustice or abuse can only be “another brick” in an already existing wall.
When you enter school there is the stated dynamic of the whole exercise, lyrically put you are "learning to fly" (insert Tom Petty here). That is what your parents and your teachers tell you and that puts a positive and productive spin on the whole thing. But every kid knows from their first time in the classroom that it all has a darker purpose. You forget all that when you first get out of school but later in life if you are the contemplative type you will have a moment of clarity and the whole thing will become obvious.
As I walked through the door on my first day as a Strongsville High School transfer student I was thinking that now I will find out what hand I have been dealt. Meaning that I will begin comparing myself to the other students and discovering where I am deficient. In the case of a transfer student you are evaluating whether you have gained or lost ground on your peers. This is important because school life pretty much boils down to how you stack up; brains, brawn, looks, charm, nerve, track record and contacts although the last two are somewhat fluid. The rest are the cards you have been dealt and the only variable is how they rank relative to your classmates. And if your new and old schools are roughly socioeconomic and demographically equal your cards will place you at about the same spot. About all you can hope for is that you will gain from leaving some historical baggage behind - especially if that was illogically holding you back at the old school.
But the point of this whole discussion is that the learning process is less about academic learning than it is about building an identity by measuring yourself against others in the social network in which you have been plopped by your parents. This is one of the things I wonder about with home school kids, does growing up without incessant social self-evaluation make you more of less secure, more or less likely to develop a productive identity, more or less able to prosper in the adult workplace?
There is some room here for the free will versus destiny arguments of course, with what you make of the hand you were dealt being free will and the hand and its relative strength being destiny. And free will to a greater extent if you actually recognize your destiny or for that matter if you recognized at the time you were in school that the principle dynamic of school was this pervasive comparison process.
But what seems to go largely unaddressed is the obsessive dance each student goes through comparing themselves to everybody else and the huge impact the result of this has on aspirations and life direction, not to mention the immense distraction it creates from the academic purpose for which one is spending so much time in the classroom. A typical day at school probably amounts to less than 20% focus on academic learning and 80% focus on social evaluation unless you find an academic area of passionate interest in which you can totally immerse yourself. And when that happens you become amazed at the swift passage of time during periods of this intense focus.
I have said in another section that one way to view an individual's life is as a process of sifting through the erotic stimuli of the universe, indulging in the ones that are a turn on and discarding those that are not. That might actually be a pretty good life if you had enough freedom. opportunity, and resources to extensively explore and experiment. Certainly qualitatively better that the banality of most people's existence. Although that ignores certain microbiology hazards.
"On a more elementary basis it could be argued that existence is simply winnowing through erotic stimuli, discarding all but a few possibilities as we discover and concentrate on those we prefer."