A "preparatory school": Prep for What?

Conversation that never occurred

"Is there life before death?" (BMcC[18-11-46-503])

"What men are willing to put up with depends on what they are able to look forward to." (Arnold Hauser)

St. Paul's Day Carcel
For Boys	:	"	You never told us how much you hated us. Why now?"
BMcC	:	"	You never taught me there could be any value in life. You intimidated me. Somehow I pretended to myself it was better than it was, and I was just a kid who was made to be partly blinded. You think I would have dared tell you what I thought if I did think it? It has taken me a long time to more clearly see what you were, and I'm now aware that I'm not done yet.[1]"

The humanist architectand educator, Louis Kahn said:

"The city is the place of availabilities. It is a place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life."(LOBELL, p. 44)

A village, in contrast, is a place where people toil day after day (to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx:) to reproduce individual and species life. A village is a place of needs, with occasional festivals to relive the tedium of an endless secular wheel of karma.

For me, St. Paul's Scoool was like a village, not a city in Kahn's honorific not merely demographic sense. Nobody inspired me to want to do anytihng -- except for them to: "lay off!", which they would not do, with their endless wheel of bad karma of ass—ignments, tests and [de]grades. (Of course I wanted to get "A"s because then they hurt me less then if I had got worse grades but the "A"s never meant anything like an honor, for I did not feel the teachers' opinions had any value, nor was it even really a reward since getting an "A" one day did not exempt me from being tested yet again the next....) It was never ending endlessly repeated threats of: Or else!

Why were these people what they were?

Why were these people what they were? What were the conditions for the possibility of them (or anybody...) being such people? What is wrong with the world to have produced such things? Congenital syphilis of the soul, passed down from each rotting generation to the next as if it as some sort of gift?

One of the most disgusting thisgs I have read recently: "Maimonides, Hebrew scholar and physician in the Middle Ages, wrote that circumcision exercised a civilizing effect by weakening the penis, thus counteracting excessive lust." (Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, "Prisoners of ritual", p. 185). I never saw any indictation that the faculty of St. Paul's School was interested in weakening penises, just in aim-inhibited homoeroticism in body contact athletics and locker room public single gender nudity. But that is crass "sex", not connoisseurship of eros.

I was childreared to not see the obvious → perhaps for no good reason but that is a differnt question. It recently dawned on me, and I have mailed Dr. Wight (+2022.10.12):

Respectfully, Sir, I have one more thought that once it dawned on me I cannot get out of my head.

Both yourself and Dr. Trusty are graduates of Gilman School?

You two are the enemy within (or turncoats). It's as if Dr. Vladimir Putin became President of The United States. He might make a very good President, but all the American people would need to have their heads turned around 180 degrees after being indoctrinated all their lives with propaganda that he was bad.

Is Dr. Trusty (to quote himself): "a little loud during athletic contests, as I join you in cheering on our boys in blue and gold." even when the lacrosse or tackle football testosterone and adrenaline intoxicated pubescent males going at each other on both sides are representatives of his side? Which side does he cheer? Or both? Or does he publicly recuse himself?

Do the young lads at St. Paul's submit essays on game day discussing whether students at Gilman school yell "Beat Gilman!" and if yes, why and if not why not?"; and, conversely, if the students at Gilman School yell: "Beat St. Paul's!", do they themselves also yell "Beat St. Paul's!" and if yes why and if no why not?

The Crusaders or The Mediators?

Respectfully,

Bradford McCormick

Prep for what?

"Why am I dying to live if I am only living to die?" (Cat Stevens, aka: Yousef)

What was St, Paul's School preparing me for? Nothing. Nothing I might want to live for (I did not aspire to head-butt). Memorizing facts that were already in ink on paper, eaches already within the easy reaches of even my teaches (←that rhymes!). St. Paul's School prepared me to look ahead but not forward continuing to be dead for long before my corpse would be certified by 2 licensed physicians.

I had no idea what living might be, nor even learning. They could have been showing us how to learn and what resources were avaiable, not testing us on memorizing facts. My father had bought a Webcor electric reel-to-reel tape recorder already when I was in elementary school. I knew how to record facts on it and play them back; I could have showed the teaches how to do it, too.

St. Paul's School prepared me to face ever more "Or else!"s, because I did not dispose over inherited wealth, and it did not prepare me to find a sinecure where I could live out my days in peace. It would be redudant to damn the place because it was already in that condition (apparently others did not feel the same).

"There is no pain to which death does not bring surcease" (Sancho Panza)

Je me souviens, Rrose Selavy.^[2]

+2023.03.21 v016
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Storm drain near the Kinsolving gymnasium, from a back-end page of the 1964 Crusader yearbook. A meatfor(sic).