The other night I sat down at the dining room table where my middle son was doing his homework. Books and papers were scattered everywhere, but I could tell his heart wasn’t really into it. “It’s getting pretty late, Son. You almost done?”
“It’s all a crock, Dad, isn’t it?” he suddenly asked, looking up from his science assignment.
“What’s a crock?”
“School.”
“School is not a crock, Son.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well,” I said, “even if it is, you’re not supposed to know about it yet.”
“But do you realize I’ve already put in seven whole years, and there’s still six more to go?”
“Ten,” I quickly corrected my son. “Don’t forget, you’ve got to go to college, too.”
“See, now that’s exactly what I mean. It never ends.”
“Trust me, it’ll go by faster than you think.”
“And now they’ve even got us going year around. It’s ruined my whole summer, Dad.”
“Now you and I both know that if you weren’t going to school, you’d just be laying around the house doing nothing anyway.”
“But that’s what kids my age are supposed to be doing during the summer.”
“No, it’s not. Summer vacation was never meant to just give kids three free months to goof off. It was to allow parents to keep their children at home for a few months to help get the crops harvested.”
“You’re making that up.”
“No, I’m not. At the turn of the century, most American’s lived on farms, and kids had to help with the harvest. So, count yourself lucky. Instead of sitting in an air-conditioned classroom reading a book, you could be out picking cotton or shucking corn.”
“Dad?”
“What?”
“I hate it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Tell me how things could always be so much worse.”
“Well,” I said, standing up to leave, “things are definitely going to be worse if you don’t finish all your homework and keep those grades up.”
“And that’s another thing. I heard you telling Mom just the other day that grades and test scores aren’t all that important to you. So how come I gotta keep trying to get A’s and B’s?”
“So, I’ll know you’re not lazy, among other things.”
“What?”
“Good grades don’t tell me you’re smart, Son. Real smarts is something which life will beat into you as you grow older. But good grades tell me how you’re doing in a lot of other areas which I think are real important.”
“Like what?”
“Well, most kids who are getting decent grades are making an effort at being organized, they listen well to people who just might know something, like their parents and teachers, and they actually flip through the pages of a good book now and then.”
“So, you really don’t care how good I get at this stupid cell anatomy stuff I’m studying here?”
“Not really. But it’s important to me that you’re willing to work hard at whatever homework your teacher gives you. If you’re willing to work hard at being a good student, then when you get a little older, who knows, you might just surprise yourself and turn out to be industrious, conscientious, and all kinds of other neat things.”
“Dad?”
“What?”
“But it’s still all a crock, though, right? I mean, they don’t have anything else to do with us, so they make us go to school.”
“Let’s just say that school is something which has to be survived. But if you really work hard at it and do well, then you get to graduate and go on to college where the chances get even better that you’ll actually learn something.”
“But Dad, what happens if I’m all burned out by the time I graduate from high school — and I don’t want to go to college?”
“Well,” I said with conviction, “there’ll always be cotton that needs picking and corn that needs shucking.”