I think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction. There is nothing wrong with developing those skills—in fact, I’ve learned the hard way how useful they can be. What is wrong is their fetishization, the way they were allowed to outrank the actual body of knowledge held within algebra or English lit. The result was that “learning” felt like a kind of bait and switch. And this frustrated me because I truly did love to learn—it just so happened I learned best away from my desk, where ideas and concepts could be made tangible.
