One of the first steps in my journey to freedom

[Hsien Seong Cheong]

While I was at high school, I was quite a precocious teenager. I had reasoning abilities that surpassed the abilities of the bottom-of-the-class degree graduates that were teaching us... which resulted in a lot of conflict and resent from my teachers!

I took geography as a GCSE subject and remember being taught the following case study:

A Welsh town with a small working male population had received a huge injection of government funding to improve the economy (job creation, building stupid structures to attract tourists etc.) but the net effect was that the economy could not sustain the growth or attract the revenue, and was still performing poorly. Our assignment in the lesson was simply to come up with a plan of things that we could do to improve the economy.

I did some calculations with the figures that we were given and called the teacher over. I pointed out that if the working male population was so low and that the economy had been harmfully inflated with government interference, surely the best thing to do is to stop spending money trying to stimulate the economy (keep in mind that I was 14 at the time and had no working knowledge of economics at all). Of course, I expected the teacher to give me a good reason as to why my calculations or theory was wrong, but instead she said "Yeah, well... you've just got to play the game."

I took this advice to heart and decided to "play the game" with my GCSEs.

Step 1: Sat my two favourite subjects early at the age of 14 (Maths & Music, I got an 'A' in both).

Step 2: Calculated the minimum amount of GCSE passes and effort I needed to put in, to get into college.

Step 3: Totally coasted through my last year of high school. Only turning up to a third of my lessons.

Step 4: Passed GCSEs with excellent grades and got into college.

As for my geography exam; I requested to sit the lower paper (maximum possible grade: C, predicted grade at start of year: A) , did the exam left handed (I'm right handed) and got a big fat D when the results came in. I counted this as my revenge for tricking me into studying an irrational, poorly designed piece of propaganda disguised as a GCSE subject and so started my journey towards finding libertarianism.

I'll save the story of my relationship with the religious education teacher for another time!

[spacepan]

Your story reminds me of the "anarchy game" we played in middle school. The teacher divided us into groups, each one producing a different thing (Food, Pens, Paper) and one group of thieves. Each group produced a fixed amount of resources but, mathematically, the game was rigged so that people would gradually die off. If a thief died first, then the game ended up working out only if each group traded for exactly what they needed each turn. If a producer died, the group produced less, thus causing more death, thus "demonstrating" that anarchy can't work. I remember reflecting upon this experience later and realizing how disingenuous and lazy it was. I had loved that class and respected the teacher, but years later, after some reflection, I'm just totally disgusted by the fact that this passes as "education."I wish I could say it's "good to hear" that someone went through something similar... but mostly it just kind of sucks.