Awesome Things and School, And Why They Should Always Have Been The Same Thing

The documentary we watched today made me want to get my childhood back so that I could have been enrolled in that video game school in New York as a kid.  My school career pre-college was pretty much uniformly awful, as I'm sure is the case for most of the kids now at art school.  I know I personally picked Cornish because it was physically far from my hometown and ideologically far from the terrible schooling I had to deal with growing up.  Seeing all those kids (even that awful pretentious one with the long hair and a last name with more consonants in it than this entire blog post so far) getting the chance to learn through activities and games and not just textbooks made me super jealous.  I would have loved to have enjoyed going to school as a kid.  I think the big difference was that the children had creative outlets.  In our school district there weren't any extracurricular activities to be had until we got into high school, at which point the part of our lives where we needed them most desperately had already passed.  Having the opportunity to express yourself and get all of your thoughts and emotions and ideas out into the world in a medium that you enjoy is a wonderful thing for a child to be able to have, and it's a shame more schools don't have programs like the ones at that school.

Anyway, enough bitching about my childhood.  I guess I should clarify that the parts that didn't involve school were perfectly wonderful and I'm not just some crazy bitter old man.  My biggest "Hmmm!" moment in this documentary so far came from the man who said that "Addiction is just a word that is used to police society."  I thought the examples he gave about certain things, such as spending a lot of time on Facebook or in World Of Warcraft, being symptoms of addiction, while spending an equal amount of time rehearsing for a play or reading a book being noteworthy and wonderful things was really interesting.  The part that resonated with me the most personally was when he suggested that certain things that are viewed as addictions might actually just be symptoms of depression.  I've never thought of it that way, but it made a lot of sense.  I'm excited to finish it tomorrow and see what they do to wrap up all the examples.