The last day of school before the two-month summer break, I felt like a weight had been lifted from my chest. It was a weight that until then I had not been aware was there. At the same time, I liked some aspects of school and I got good grades. Now that I had kids of my own, I realize that old ambivalence is still present. I’m glad they like going, but I also don’t want them to make it the center of their lives.
Part of that ambivalence comes from my realization that the biggest value of having an education is to know that there’s nothing special about it. But I also wonder if there’s a deeper hesitancy. Something related to masculinity, salubrious or toxic. Here is how Wallace Stegner approaches this question in Wolf Willow, describing his childhood in late frontier Saskatchewan:
Honored and imitated among us where those with special skills, so long as the skills were not too civilized. We admired good shots, good riders, tough fighters, dirty talkers, stoical endurers of pain. […] School, and success therein, never fully compensated for the lacks I felt in myself. I found early that I could shine in class, and I always had a piece to speak in school entertainments, and teachers found me reliable at cleaning blackboards, but teachers were women, and school was a woman’s world, the booby prize for those not capable of being men. The worst of it was that I liked school, and liked a good many things about the womanish world, but I wouldn’t have dared to admit it, and I could not respect the praise of my teachers any more than I could that of my music teacher or my mother.
“He has the arteestic temperament,” said Madame Dujadin while collecting her pay for my piano lesson. “He’s sensitive,” my mother would tell her friends […] Women giving me the praise I would have liked to get from my father or Slivers or the Assiniboin halfbreed down at the Lazy-S. I wanted to be made out of whang leather.
Nehaveigur 