It was warm and sunny in Ballarat today. Highly unusual for any day of the year, let alone June. I went down the street and sat outside for coffee to soak up a few rays.
Sitting at the next table across from me were a nice respectable middle-class couple in their 30s with their kids. They obviously had some cash behind them, as you would need to do. They dressed conservatively; the mum looked like she dressed out of the pages of Marie Claire with a beige jacket and brown rimmed sunnies. The dad was wearing a white embroidered Country Road jumper, thin jeans and New Balance sneakers. He was sporting a porn star moustache, always a mark of individuals in today’s world. He came and sat down at the table with his family after ordering, and the table closed ranks around itself.
As I was sitting waiting for my coffee to arrive, I started thinking what it would be like talking to these kinds of people at parent-teacher interviews. This would be the only time you ever talked to them: well it’s been interesting having five minutes of insight into your world of happiness, nice you’re still trusting a peasant such like yours truly with your kids education.
It’s almost as though the education system depends on low self-esteem in teachers to be able to find anyone still willing to work in it. My self-esteem repairs a little bit every day I’m nowhere near what is really jumped-up daycare, which is all mass education really amounts to. It’s a terrible education system but an excellent way of keeping kids corralled and supervised so all the parents can go to work and contribute to GDP. If anyone is allowed to teach or learn anything genuinely useful it’s either by accident or active, conscious subversion.
And you take all that so all the high-esteem achievers can have families, and comfort, and shelter.
I usually take my coffee and leave, and then finish it at home. The sun was glorious, so I did something different: I sat outside and enjoyed both caffeine and rays as an unemployed zero and utter nobody who learnt to treat themselves better.
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