Quote from I hated school, a blog posting by climber and climbing coach Dave MacLeod:

Before I found a focus, I was in the same situation as many kids. I went to school and sat in classes where teachers spent a big proportion of the time keeping order and not developing interest. I didn’t enjoy it, and even as a kid I could recognise there was much time being wasted.

Once I started climbing, and began skipping school, I was the opposite from a draw on resources. I learned by myself, eagerly. Where before it took teacher time and resources to force feed me learning, now I took it in as fast as I could with no additional help at all. In an ideal situation, school should have been a place that focused this energy, and facilitated even faster, deeper and broader learning. But my teachers were too busy trying to get me to fit the straightjacket to get near this opportunity.

That’s not so much of an indictment as a sympathy vote for teachers.

The solution for youngsters – skip school and go climbing? Of course not! Try lots of things and find something that makes you want to stay up at night and read about video compression algorithms for whatever you want to shoot and get on youtube or something, or training for climbing, or… – whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.

This is exactly the kind of piece I am eager to learn of and link to, so deep thanks to Alan Little for alerting me to this one.  I was sorely tempted to copy and paste the whole thing, which is not so very much longer and well worth reading right through.

Many teachers will surely share MacLeod’s attitude to igniting the passion of pupils rather than just bashing a standard curriculum into them, and will surely feel just as strongly about that straightjacket that MacLeod hated, and which they too are obliged to submit to.  I deduce from this that the regime MacLeod endured dates from about 1990.  By now, the straightjacket may have got even tighter.

The picture to the right is a slice of this one.  More MacLeod (and others) in action snaps here.  MacLeod also does lectures.