STUPID SCHOOL
Let it be known that I have an in with a public American highschool with more than 1,000 students. I’m withholding names to protect the identities of my snitches.
If you don’t believe half of what you read here, I understand. Call me a liar. Say I’m exaggerating. Say I have an agenda. It won’t hurt my feelings and I’m not going to argue. I’m not sure I would believe it either, if I didn’t have good sources.
I’m going to tell you about a school. It’s not the worst school in America. It’s not in a violent, crime-ridden area. I assume there are many others just like it. This is about an ordinary American school in a nice neighborhood in a city with an above-average median household income. This is a about a stupid school that trains kids to be stupid.
For the sake of this, we’re calling it Stupid School.
Honors Classes
You might be shocked to learn that 100% of the student body at Stupid School is enrolled in honors classes. That’s right, all of them. Like me, you might assume that this must be a school for gifted kids. Like me, you might be surprised to learn that it isn’t. All classes are honors classes. ALL CLASSES. All of the kids are enrolled into ordinary classes, but they are all called “honors.” They had to create a new category of honors honors classes—the actual AP honors classes.
It’s grade inflation. They crank out unearned “honors graduates,” and deflate the value of the honor. Essentially, they’re defrauding universities by sending them kids who aren’t as accomplished as their resumés boast. But I’m not so sure that the colleges even care. They’re happy, just so long as the federal loan check clears (it always does). A high college acceptance rate after graduation helps the high school’s ranking in “best schools in the [redacted] area.” And a high school ranking helps the value of nearby real estate. Higher valued real estate means higher tax revenue.
Colleges win. The high school wins. Local home owners win. The city government wins. Everybody wins. Not the kids, obviously. The kids don’t win. Everyone who matters wins.
Math
In stupid school, there is a math class where students are given 10 math problems for homework every day. Kids get full credit for the assignment if they answer at least one of the questions, even if the answer is wrong. Your brain is not malfunctioning. Read that again if you need to. I had to be told twice because I thought there was no possible way that was right. If a kid answers 10 questions and gets them all right, they get an A. If a kid writes a random number on a sheet of paper and turns it in, they also get an A.
Everyone gets an A. If you can believe it, there are kids who still find a way to fail this class.
But luckily for them, the school has another policy to rescue these kids from the consequences of their own decisions. That brings us to…
Failure is Nearly Impossible
For one week of the year, attending class is optional. Any student who shows up this week is given passing grades in all of their classes. They don’t have to do anything. They just have to be there. A kid can skip school every day for the entire year, but if they show up to school this one week in June, they will pass all of their classes and graduate to the next grade.
A lot of kids take this option. And yet there are kids who still manage to fail and drop out of Stupid School.
Fights
Some entrepreneurial student at Stupid School made an Instagram account dedicated to fights. Not UFC. Not boxing. No, these were fights of kids fighting each other. Most of them filmed at school. Every kid at the school knew about it, and shared their own cell phone videos. This account uploaded new videos about twice a week. Those were only the fights that were caught on video.
The account has been taken down. Parents flagged it to Instagram after they learned about it, a whole year after it was created. The fights are still happening, and the recordings are probably being uploaded somewhere else, like TikTok.
And I almost forgot about the kids who were busted for bringing guns to school. The schools’ parents were not informed. The school didn’t want all that smoke. Parents learned through word-of-mouth, mostly by asking their kids, “So, how was school today?”
Lightning Round!
In geography class, kids spent a month on gentrification. A MONTH. There are kids at that school who think that Africa is a country, but don’t know for sure which continent it’s on.
Biology class isn’t interested in dissecting frogs or studying anatomy. Instead, biology class spent a month focused on sexual consent. Apparently, these kids needed instruction on how to not accidentally rape someone. Sex ed teaches criminology.
Kids in photography class can’t use their own cameras. They can use cameras provided by the school or the cameras on their phones. It would be unfair for some kids to have better cameras than others, so kids are taught how to take photos with their smart phones. The kids already know how to do that. I’ve seen their videos on Instagram of them beating the shit out of each other.
One French teacher showed the kids the Disney movie Ratatouille four times in one semester. The movie was in the English language. It didn’t even have French subtitles. The class is 45 minutes long, so it takes two class days to watch the movie all the way through.
Kids are bussed across town to get to school. I know of one broke, non-white student, child of a single mom with two jobs, who can't go to the school that's a half mile away. This student has to cross a very busy city on public transit to go to Stupid School. It takes an hour-and-a-half each way. She’s on a bus for 15 hours a week.
Bureaucratic Chaos
The scheduling is insane. School starts at 8AM, except for on days when it starts at 9AM. Some days, classes are 45 minutes long. Other days, they’re an hour and a half. The school changes schedules on a whim.
Classes are canceled or changed without explanation. There’s no info on the website. No emails are sent to parents. The only way to know what the hell is going on is to join a mass group texts with other parents who somehow have secret, esoteric knowledge about if there is school tomorrow or not.
Teachers Have Given Up
Teacher morale isn't low. It's nonexistent. The teachers are spent. They simply do not give a fuck. Once upon a time, they all gave a fuck. Now, they've come to terms with two facts:
They have no power at all to govern their classes or use their own judgment in instruction. They do as they are told by the department of education and countless state apparatchiks who micromanage from a distance.
Teachers basically can't be fired. The Union provides career immortality, plus the golden handcuffs of government benefits.
Teachers are powerless mouth pieces for state interests who are incentivized to invent rules and systems that make it impossible for kids to fail. It sucks. Any teacher who sticks around and toughs it out still gets their summers off, they still get their paycheck, and still get their awesome insurance and retirement package. You don’t think it’s the kind of job you can just coast through and half-ass. But then one day you say, “Fuck it,” and put on Ratatouille. Then you do it again. And again. And again. It just gets easier every time.
None of the teachers thought that this would be their life.
Dumb Dummies
I call it Stupid School, but this doesn’t look like a school to me. This is a minimum-security juvenile detention center. Just like prison, you can take classes and get your GED if you like, but it’s totally optional. The most important thing is that you be in the detention center, and not out there in the wild. Society can’t function with a bunch of stupid, hormonally-activated kids with zero impulse control and no time preference, running loose in the streets. Stupid School is adolescent containment. If some kids should learn something incidentally, well, that’s just a cherry on top.
The goal of the administration is to keep the kids inside the building for four years, then reward them with forged education credentials. Yes, lil Johnny got straight A’s in honors math. He wrote the number 11 on a sheet of paper and turned it in every day. Lil Johnny is smart. He’s going to college. Lil Johnny is exactly who you want as your oncologist.
The kids are made stupid then released into an adult world where success requires more education and more brains than at any other time in history. You can’t just get a cool union job at Jeep with a 7th grade reading level. Not anymore. These kids’ work ethic is so totally fucked that I wouldn’t trust a graduate from Stupid School to shingle a roof. Why would I? There are paperless Guatemalan border jumpers with more brains, stronger work ethic, and better English language skills.
I hate this school. I resent the people who work there. I resent the people in the state and national capitols who keep it this way. I hate the teachers’ union. If all of these people were a conspiracy of agents financed and trained by a hostile foreign nation for the purpose of deliberately fucking a generation of kids, how would you even know? How would it even look different?