January 22, 2015
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I write with some feeling here as both my kids are un-bookish. Missie, now 22, fidgeted through a year at a local four-year college, then bailed out (“it’s boring …”) and found work as a bartender, which she enjoys. Junior never wanted to do anything but join the military. He enlisted straight from high school graduation and is now a paratrooper stationed in Alaska, coming home on leave twice a year with romantic stories of doing practice jumps under the Northern Lights.
These are smart, healthy, well-adjusted kids, by the way, raised in a house full of books, with a mom who composes poetry while walking her dog. The descriptor “un-bookish” actually needs some qualifying. Missie is a keen reader of fiction, with good literary taste”I have made her a Dickens fan. She’s just had enough years of sitting in a desk being talked at. It’s boring.
Junior actually is un-bookish. He boasts of not having opened a book since graduation. He took in enough from his teachers, though, to make some serious pocket money writing term papers for classmates; and he returns serve very capably in arguments with his old man.
I”m fine with it, and would be even if I weren”t saving a bundle on college fees. In any case, as a hard genetic determinist (nature-nurture looks to me to be about 90-10), I”m fatalistic. There are definitely hereditary influences there. My father, my brother, and my wife’s father all left school at the earliest opportunity to enlist in the military.
“Ten thousand occupations are lowly; only book-learning is exalted.” So goes the Chinese proverb. I say that’s a fine motto … for a rigid despotism where arrogant Mandarins tax-farm a cowed peasantry. Do I want to live in a country like that? No.
