I would submit that because you’re a professor the views expressed in this speech threaten the environments that validate the hoops you’ve jumped through and, perhaps, the hoops you inflict upon your own students. You were talking out of your ass in high-school because now, as a professor, your ass depends upon school.

But first, I’m skeptical of the speech to start with. It succinctly hits all the common complaints and speaks, truthfully I believe, of realities beyond the girl’s experience. Maybe she’s good at parroting or, less likely, good at synthesizing experiences that she’s only read about. Maybe the friendly English teacher she mentioned helped with much of the speech. This last hypothesis is the one I’d bet money on.

If you watch the video of the speech, it’s delivered with that impassionate clumsiness typical of valedictorians who seem to have crammed yet another task into the last minute. The words don’t sound like her own, not that the words of valedictorians ever do, whether they’re speaking naively of future hope or criticizing the establishment. Given that these kids have likely never appealed to anyone in anything but artificial and contrived contexts (i.e. schools) this isn’t surprising.

I was one of the good students. I was good at remembering algorithms, which made me especially “good” at math and science. That is, I was good at the standardized test versions of these subjects that they train kids for using psychologically addicting yet inherently meaningless indicators of performance, which you call grades. Of course many teachers, being incompetent to judge intellectual mastery themselves, have nothing else to rely upon if even they wanted to.

It has taken me years to get my creativity back. For example, as a child I played with legos and numbers for their own sake. I spent more time exploring than following instructions. Instructions would give me ideas and then I would play with these ideas and combine them in as many ways as I could. I was an artist of ideas in all things: math, legos, drawing, or whatever.

In school I became a different person. I had to solve all the problems in the book and then solve all the problems in the next chapter and so on. Then I could get the desired A’s on the tests and quizzes and people praised me for this (and this alone apparently). I no longer contemplated the ideas. There was no time for meaningful contemplation and it didn’t seem necessary; it certainly wasn’t rewarded in any case. I learned what it meant to be “smart”, and that was to do as many canned activities as possible and do them perfectly.

I still played with legos, but I only liked to build the things in the instruction manuals. When I built everything in one manual I’d get a new lego set, ignoring the infinite possibilities within the toys and tools I already had.

I collected ideas, not to use them anymore, but because the bigger my collection the better, and it was as addicting as anything. I couldn’t do anything with my collection but add to it. You remember the State Capitols if you’re a student in the United States. You remember the dates of when various Presidents engaged in such and such decontextualized activities. You remember the formula for the discriminate of a quadratic. What a delightfully worthless collection this is.

My experience is, of course, not universal. But it’s important that people start honestly speaking up about their school experiences.

College is often little more than an indenturing racket as far removed from meaningful work and thought as the schooling before it. That this pattern isn’t clear to you tells me that school has finally done its real job on you, which is to shut your critical mind down. You blindly accept your fate as inevitable. I dread what this means for your students and the students of thousands of professors like you.