Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
–John Dewey
School’s out for summer/ School’s out forever
–Alice Cooper “School’s Out”
Why must we harken back to high school? Another decade disappears, so time to go back, old school. Time to dust off the letter jacket and see if there is any school spirit left in your cells. One school of thought claims, “A body replaces all its cells every seven years.” You might be an entirely different person at this reunion—this is not true, however. If you did not skip so much your senior year (when you were too cool for school), you would have learned that neurons in the brain and certain muscle cells are not replaced and last a lifetime! So, yes: you will be the same person you were 30 years ago when you attend your 30th reunion and revisit schoolyard politics—just closer to retirement than to the days of your halcyon youth when you finished high school (not finishing school), went to college and earned an unmarketable major, stuck by the person who cheated on you (a correspondence class with the school of fools), got divorced (the school of regrets), ended up stuck in a rut (the school of hard knocks), and then went to evening school to change careers and your life (somewhat).
And just like you, your kids were tethered to school. On your custody days, you did your school runs to pick them up. When school was out, you parked behind the buses in the school zone and watched (in a school daze) as the children emptied from the building like a school of fish scattering. Then you chauffeured your kids to their after-school programs, school competitions, school recitals, and Sunday school classes. Eventually, it was time for your kids to go off to college—if you did everything right (keeping them away from the school of the streets, the school of misfits, and the school of roving sharks). And maybe they decided to make something of themselves by going off to graduate school, business school, or medical school—and (please) not a pointless farrago like art school!
From the school of dreams to the school of hard lessons—all bestowed by the school of life—where did all that time go? A lifetime spent in school… A lifetime of school in session… A cosmic school of sempiternal absurdity.
You are ~ school: your children are ~ school: your children’s children ~ will be school, too.
And then—after your 30th, your 40th, maybe even your 50th reunion—when it is all finally done, you will be out of school and in a different school altogether. And after your senescence, all the school infused in your cells will disperse into the universe… like stardust.
Image created using Midjourney
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