School Is for Losers: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

 

Very often a [[Family-Unfriendly Aesop]].

 

 

== Anime & Manga ==

* Half the cast of ''[[Akira]]'' fits this trope.

* "Billy S" by Skye Sweetnam.

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

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

 

== Live Action TV ==

* Tara from ''[[True Blood]]''.

* On [[Hyperdrive]], Henderson makes a small jab at Teal when she mentioned she took a year off after university, as he [[Slobs Versus Snobs|had to start working and didn't get to to go to university at all]].

* One episode of ''[[Married... with Children]]'' had Kelly gaining an internship at a tv station. Al invoked the trope the moment he learned Kelly was offered a three-year-long contract that paid 250 thousand dollars per year and required her to drop out of school.

* In the ''[[Pac-Man]]'' second season opener "Hey, Hey, Hey … It's P.J.", Pac-Man's teenage nephew had this attitude toward high school.

* ''[[The Simpsons]]'' From "Bart's Comet":

'''Skinner''': [[Big No|Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!]]<ref>This being his [[Rule of Three|third]] [[Big No]] in a row, after Bart gets the credit for discovering the comet with his telescope and letting a prank weather balloon bearing his image out of his grip, which he had just managed to catch</ref> }}

 

 

== [[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]]).

** However, Zappa's opinion isn't as much as this trope as you might think- he had no issues with book-learning, and was a genius autodidact. He was just of the opinion that the American School System was...not very good.

*** 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.

* 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.

[[Category:Anti-Intellectualism]]

[[Category:School Tropes]]