#these concepts are old as all hell and kinda have been marinated in my brain soup for a while.

[the-prince-rambles]

Thinking about some of my old writing projects I want to restart, namely a one act play I wrote (about two best friends in love, and quite possibly one of the cutest confessions ever), and a short story about an eldritch library thats very Welcome to Nightvale - esque. (sort of--)

Anyways I might rewrite those, or start making more solid concepts once I figure it out. (or perhaps I'll add the library to an already existing universe I have, it would fit well.)

[samtheflamingomain]

the miseducation of kate

As someone who's been shamed for ignorance before, I try really hard not to judge people who don't know certain things. Not everyone has the interest in knowing all the world capitals like me, so when someone guesses Toronto instead of Ottawa, I really don't care. Yeah, you're wrong, but if you don't live here it really doesn't matter. Hell, even if you live in Ottawa it doesn't matter.

If someone mispronounces an obscure word, that means they've only ever read it. That means they read it. As someone who was tricked by my parents into pronouncing "caveat" as cave-eat for a solid few years before hearing it aloud, and them finding it to be a hilarious joke years in the making, it actually quite pisses me off.

Anyway. The subject of today's post is my new roommate, Kate. She's very sweet, bubbly and nice. She's also very... ignorant. Not in a demeaning way. She simply hasn't been exposed to a lot of the education that I received growing up because she has a learning disability that placed her into the "living skills" class in high school.

In Ontario, when you get to high school, you pick* a stream: college or university. You can switch between them every year - say you thought you wanted to go to university but then decided on college, you could "drop down". "Going up" was harder, but one of my best friends did it and is now a marine biologist. It wasn't classist or looked-down upon.

*However, there was another "stream" called "life skills" which you could not pick, but be banished to. It's a program that basically just babysits you until you're 18 because the school doesn't know how to help you. It's a bad name, because they don't teach you how to budget, cook, clean or really any "life skills". It teaches you very basic concepts that the students basically can't live without. I'm talking basic math, identifying what's a verb and a noun, and a French class exemption. A lot of people that I know in the LS stream hated it and felt very babied, but had no way out. They simply couldn't do a college-level class. Not allowed.

So Kate, who is 21, just finished high school (no shame, not her fault) and she knows she's not smart enough for college (no shame, not her fault, actually very good for her to know that) and has accepted this. She works retail but she enjoys it.

And honestly, this is more an attack on the Ontario school system than a critique about Kate herself. I feel like, as a society, we greatly failed her.

So here we go. Today we played Cards Against Humanity, which we had to teach her. A few rounds go by. Then it's her turn as the black carder. She got "When I become Prime Minister (Canadian version) I will create the Federal Department of ____". I had a lot of great cards, but I knew she wouldn't know who Sean Penn was. So I went in kinda weak with "The Holocaust".

She started with 2 other cards, then got to "Stalin". Which she pronounced "Stalling?" And after a few seconds we realized she simply had no knowledge of him at all. Fair enough, she's still young, didn't do much history. Then.... "The Hollercost?"

I fucking blanked. I'm almost never literally speechless. Everyone else scrambled, but instantly I knew. She had no fucking idea what the Holocaust is.

She didn't recognize the word "Nazi". Not even "Grammar-Nazi".

She didn't know Hitler by name or by photo.

She didn't know Elvis by name or by photo.

But then I broke. I said feebly, "Who was president before Obama?"

And she winced and said, "I have no idea". Probably saving my life, she DID recognize Bush by name.

Then someone said, "He was president on 9/11"

And she said, and I cannot fucking make this up: "9/11? Like, 9-1-1?"

I honestly have no memory of what anybody else said during this conversation because I just... literally, in my brain, I could not comprehend a reality where a 21 year old has never encountered any of these things in her entire life.

I don't place any blame on her. She isn't booksmart and got a shit education. But she talks about her parents being pretty decent people. You'd think at ONE POINT in 21 years they'd casually mention 9/11 or the Holocaust, y'know??

I'm still in a state of shock. I've never felt so psychically damaged from a single conversation before.

I recall a specific XKCD comic. It something like this: "99.9% of people know about mentos and coke, right? Well that leaves 0.1% that don't. In America, that's about 30k ppl. Statistically, you're bound to encounter one of these people one day and blow their minds." And when I saw the comic I said "yeah makes sense" but I never expected it to be like 20 things at once that she's in the 0.1% of.

Anyway, fuck you Ontario school system.

Stay Greater