An Education in Doubt

Catherine Cusick | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (2,900 words)
We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of homeschooling shows a different road that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into schooling back into family education might cure two ailments with one medicine, repairing families as it repairs children.
— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down
I stood and, still shaking, tried to pry loose the small length of copper tubing. I almost had it when Dad flung a catalytic converter. I leapt aside, cutting my hand on the serrated edge of a punctured tank. I wiped the blood on my jeans and shouted, “Don’t throw them here! I’m here!”
Dad looked up, surprised. He’d forgotten I was there.
— Tara Westover, Educated
When I was 9, my dad brought home a copy of Matilda on VHS. Every time I watched Matilda best her unfit parents and take down the unforgivably violent Trunchbull, something would swell in my heart.
“Daddy,” Mara Wilson pleads up to Danny DeVito, one of the only actors ever to plead at him in that direction. “You’re a crook.”
“What?” DeVito says, turning away from training Matilda’s brother in the junk tricks of his trade at the auto shop. He’s teaching his son how to fudge the mileage on used cars by rewinding an odometer with a hand drill.
“This is illegal,” Wilson says, stomping an indignant little foot.
“You make money?” DeVito asks a 9-year-old. “Do you have a job?”
“No,” Wilson replies. (Of course, Wilson does have a job. We are watching her do it. She’s hard at work headlining a major motion picture that ends up grossing $33 million at the box office.)
I, too, am 9 years old, watching Wilson back in 1996, crossing my gangly legs one over the other on the beige carpet in my family’s den.
“But don’t people need good cars?” Wilson-as-Matilda asks. “Can’t you sell good cars, Dad?”
“Listen, you little wiseacre,” DeVito begins, launching into one of those custom-made lines for movie trailers. “I’m smart, you’re dumb; I’m big, you’re little; I’m right, you’re wrong. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Wilson takes one decisive look around. She sees her father’s signature hat next to some superglue.
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