In one of my schools when I was about 12 years old it was my job to cut the firewood and light the fires in the classrooms.. We had an axe and a tomahawk and the wood pile was hidden behind a classroom.
One day our headmaster left I didn't know why but it turned out he was a bit to handy with one of the girls so to speak. I always wondered what happened to the girl. Anyway with no headmaster a couple of us found a chemistry set and we basically created some coal distillate. This happen during the turmoil following the removal of the headmaster and for about 4 weeks the kids and the substitute teachers were subject to carbon monoxide, methane and god knows what else as we went to work uncontrolled by teachers.
Also found the electrical teaching material and happily arced out batteries.
At one point some of my friends got hold of bullets and tried to make a bomb it was moderately successfull but I don't advise using a petrol soaked string as a fuse.
At a bigger school I also became proficient at removing screws from buses and other structure (I don't know why) and worked out how to open many of the locked doors. At that school I hung around with kids sent from the big city to a borstal to get them away from gangs so I was their lookout when they smoked in the toilets. Who would have thought that a loner country kid had a lot in common with big city kids.
I am writing this as from this article I would not have survived in a modern school and I would not have turned out to be the me I am now. The only reason I am who I am is because the schools, and obviously the society, for good and bad had enough elasticity for children like me to exist.
Maybe there was at the same time a tolerance and an expectation so my odd behaviour was accepted as long as I meet other perhaps unmeasurable standards like lighting fires and not attacking children with the axe.
I don't think schools in their current state teach anything worth while and are just day detention centres within an indoctrination system.
I think the school system has just devolved to a prison system because society is just a prison system. Today an axe in a school would be seen as a threat but when I was young it was an essential tool. As 8 or 12 years old we were quite capable of acting in a mature way and knew what was right or wrong. I still remember acts of great empathy by other children.
Children are a product of their environment. The schools fail because our society has failed and the parents of today are failing but we can't see this failure because we are blinded by ideology or ignorance or propaganda.
That was a rant.
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