School Is for Losers: Difference between revisions

* The third ''[[Big Momma]]'' movie featured [[Wholesome Crossdresser|the cop's]] stepson thinking like that.

 

 

* Approximately 50% of the lyrics of "She's Sexy + 17" by the Stray Cats.

* "Billy S" by Skye Sweetnam.

* "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" by [[Billy Joel]]:

''If you are then you think too much.''}}

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* In ''[[Disgaea|Disgaea 3]],'' the Maritsu Evil Academy ''rewards'' students who act this way. But then, it ''is'' an ''evil'' academy...

** The teachers have very practical reasons for this: namely, with no students, they effectively get paid to sit on their ass all day. At one point, you have to beat the teacher into actually showing up for a class you take.

 

== Web Animation ==

* [[Harry Potter]] says this in one of the ''[[Potter Puppet Pals]]'' skits, where he thinks he's too cool for school. He doesn't normally think this in the actual books, though; while he doesn't always like the class work, he does like Hogwarts in general.

 

== Western Animation ==

** Another episode, ''Loan-A-Lisa'',<ref>Not to be confused with ''Moaning Lisa'' or ''Mona Leaves-a''</ref> has Lisa meeting a bunch of famous successful people who are all college drop-outs.

* ''[[The Fairly OddParents]]'' [[Back to School]] episode "The Old Man and the C-" revealed that Timmy's Dad didn't finish elementary school because someone told him he was too cool for school. He then became Timmy's classmate and it seemed nothing would prevent him from graduating this time until the same person appeared again.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

* [http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm Truth In Television]. The attitude, anyway.

** For those too lazy to read, it claims that school makes you stupid, and that the American school system was in fact created for this specific purpose. It's a masterpiece of [[You Fail Logic Forever]] (at one point it reminds us that the modern American school system was co-created by a scientist who worked on poison gas and nuclear weapons, [[Hitler Ate Sugar|as a subtle hint that this makes school evil]]).

** Another common charge is that colleges are only really good at producing new college professors.

* [[Frank Zappa]] was fanatically opposed to the American educational system, claiming that it was deliberately made to turn people into zombie conformists. So he pulled his kids out of school when they turned 15, and refused to pay for any college education.

*** Of course, any school system is absolutely terrible... if you don't learn well the way they teach. People learn different ways (examples, theory, hands-on, group work, etc.), and the American education system typically encourages variation, at least in part for people to learn how they themselves best learn. But the variation itself can create confusion and too little of the right kind of teaching for a person can leave them behind.

* This troper watched a documentary about a year in the life of a high school in Baltimore. Attendance was one of the school's biggest issues. They interviewed several students and their whole attitude was this trope, with one student (who was 18 and in the NINTH grade for the THIRD time) saying the following:

* A somewhat better-thought-out article expressed a similar sentiment, although it was specifically about teen angst; the merits of the education system were cited as a main cause, but weren't the actual point. To sum up, education isn't the problem, but the way in which modern education approaches the notion of being well-rounded reduces school to a glorified daycare where children are "taught" to do menial makework with little apparent (and, frequently, actual) relevance to any but the most parochial of future careers, and teen angst is a result of youngsters being aware of this; it then contrasts this with the past, when apprenticeships were more common and had young people doing work more obviously related to a future career, pointing out that teen angst didn't usually happen back then, so if nothing else, it at least proves that it's not because of "hormones" like everyone thinks it is.

** I think the essay is Paul Graham's [http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"]. It's [[Better Than It Sounds]], and makes a lot of very good points even if you don't necessarily agree with the conclusions.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Anti-Intellectualism]]

[[Category:School Tropes]]