WelcomeStudy hell
Johannes Gutenberg is credited with havin ginvented the printing press in 1436. the aboe picture of young men dutifuly producing unilluminated manuscripts is from approximately 1956, over half a millenium later.
"Hammurabi's children made their house of slavery's bricks imprimatured by some mad priest's imagined good. The good is gone, the priest stamps on...." (George Delury)
There mostly upper-middle class young men are doing their homework in the middle of the day in "study hall": a 50 minute time block during which they had no ass-igned course wherein to sit on a hard wood chair and obey aone of their masters (this was after 1863 in USA), performing like trained seals but not getting any fish, onlu, if they performed their tricks, a passing or even an "A" grade. If they got enough "A"s, they did get a reward: they were free to spend their "free" (i.e.: on assigned course) period in the school's library, not in this claustrophobic place: "Study hall".
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) was a good trained seal or at worst successfully faked it. I performed well so I never even once had to put up with sitting out a class period [it was males only, so nobody had the menstrual kind which I did not know about...] in study hall.
And the above picture is unfair: When I was subjected to this pedagogical institution, study hall was not in a brighty lit albeit nonetheless still spiritually dark classroom as shown here, but in a large knotty pine panelled room in the building's attic, where most of the light came from overhead flourescent tubes. This was like a big "club basement" in somebody's house (there had been one of those in the house where I lived between about 4th and my first iteration of the first half of 7th grade (Richmond Virginia), on the opposite side of the basement from the maid's room).
"What men are willing to put up with depends on what they are able to look forward to." (Arnold Hauser)
For me, not much. (The other students did not seem to be affected by it the way I was.) Half way between this place and the split level where I was interred the rest of the time, atop a gentky sloping hill, wh=as the opera singer Rosa Poncell's Villa Pace which, as far asa I wsa concerned, wa as real as Ronad Reagan's "shining city on a hill", which was probably 1996 Pruditarian Boston, where the Cabots spoke only to the Lodges and the Lodges spoke only to God and none fessed up that they perforce sometimes copulated, oh dear, Nancy....
I will not repeat here the story of my becoming a pedagogical heretic before I was to become an atheist in this school which was nominally associated wih the Episcopal Church but where they worshipped graven images (shiny plated varsity lacrosse team victory trophy cups). You can read that story: here. Because I was an "A" student, they let me get away with it but really they probably never gave it a second thought sh=ince they did not think in general but only won varsity lacrosse games: Go team!
Since all they did was try whether by intent or just "notes by rote" to murder my soul, why didn't they just kill me and themselevs too, since they were already dead or perhaps more precisely: had never lived? [39.4324433, -76.6766731] I was like Galileo, under house arrest. Eppur si muove, but so what? What would Peter Ramus have thought of this damned place?
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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