Is It Worth It?

I may have read Fahrenheit 451 as a student in a Christian school, but that doesn’t justify the harm that was done to me and to other students. Most of what I “learned” was like what Clarisse from Fahrenheit 451 describes as “a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not.” Looking at Clarisse was like looking in a mirror for me. Her disdain for modern education closely paralleled mine in that modern education seemed just like too many paltry scraps of information that we have no hope of piecing together. The people of Fahrenheit 451 didn’t burn books because they were afraid of knowledge, but because they were afraid of the uncertainty that certain moral questions create. Concluding that it was easier to avoid the need for such questions, they created an escapist society that made it next to impossible to pose those questions.

My school did not need to burn books in. Instead, they gave us the Book that was supposed to end all books and burned us at both ends. Our brains were laid out on a scale as we tried to outpace each other. Some of us far outpaced the others. Some of us fell behind. Others withdrew from the race altogether by taking their lives. It wasn’t until one of our classmates’ brains flew through the air in pieces intermingled with…