School’s a Cow, It Takes Away Your Rights

I’d meant to follow up on the last JUG meeting and Craig R. McClanahan’s talk, “The state of web frameworks,” but that can wait. Today I’m stepping away from technical topics again to lecture about something that has been eating at me for a while: our education system. If I use strong words in places, I mean them.

School is the foundation of life, you might say, and on that basis you’d expect it to take at least some account of life itself. It’s been sixteen years since the revolution, but I’d say our education system is still rotting somewhere deep in socialism. True, first graders today no longer draw the cruiser Aurora, as I did in the year of our Lord 1986, but the “teaching” methods are still the same.

Unfortunately, the end products of that system, its graduates, reflect it perfectly. It takes no great intellectual effort to see that if our students really need two things, they’re a command of English and the ability to find and use information. Our schools emphasize memorization above all else.

So what matters is whether you can remember information for a short time. Finding it, understanding it and using it hardly count. To exaggerate a little, school is basically good memory training. In practice that’s about as useful as ice skates to a football player.

Unfortunately, the people who come after me have to endure the same ordeals I did. What would it take for the education system to catch up with the times? With apologies to the exceptions that prove the rule, teachers who understand what the times demand would need to replace the relics of socialism everywhere. We could pay them properly out of the taxes we all pay, the ones that vanish somewhere in the tentacles of that peculiar welfare octopus.

Finally, my respect to those who treat teaching as a calling despite the system and the miserable pay.

Wanastowi Vjecy — Škola je kráva (School’s a Cow)

School’s a cow:

School is here and screws everything up, shuts your head and takes your brain apart
School’s a cow, that’s what it is, it’ll train you to be a cripple in the queue

Here I am — now you’ve got me
School’s a cow, it takes away my rights — I’ll give it hell
Here I am — a revolutionary
School’s a cow, its power and glory are fading — it’s drawing its last breath

Doctor Professor Mrázová will forge a brand-new kind of idiot
You want to run away from school — the conveyor belt is moving
People keep falling into the grinder, over and over
The school bell rings, your stomach twists tight
You duck around the corner — you just want to be alone
I know those morning cramps well, too

Here I am — now you’ve got me
School’s a cow, it takes away my rights — I’ll give it hell
Here I am — a revolutionary
School’s a cow, its power and glory are fading — it’s drawing its last breath
Here I am — now you’ve got me
School’s a cow, it takes away my rights — I’ll give it hell
Here I am — a revolutionary
School’s a cow, its power and glory are fading — it’s drawing its last breeeath