we never learnt much in school, it was just that by the time you stayed there enough years you’d somehow picked up quite alot of information. The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the sqaure of the other two sides, Madrid is the capitol of Spain, Charles Dickens wrote DAVID COPPERFEILD. At best I suppose you leant useful information like how to treat snakebite and how to use PowerPoint. At worst you wasted a lot of time memorising the first twenty elements of the periodic table, the definition of personification, and the economic effects of the Gold Rush. It was like school was taking us on a road from ignorance to knowledge but there was another road that school didn’t take into account. What was that road called? The one from ignorance to smewhere else, I suppose. That girl in the Wirrawee market who told me about Taoism knew about it but school didn’t. If school had bothered with that road, if they’d even taken is to the start of it and shown us where it went, if they’d so much as lent us a map, I would say that school might have been worthwhile. I’m not saying it was a complete waste of time, but I think we could have picked up that info about snakebite and PowerPoint much faster and more efficiently somewhere else. So really what we were left with was school as a social club, and sometimes I thought the adults were happy with that: they secretly saw it as a place where they could park kids till we grew up and were useful to them. Giant childcare centres.

- Written by John Marsden.