Member-only story
When Your Education Sucks
Use it to learn compassion.
I started kindergarten in1965. Those were the days when boys and girls had separate playgrounds and teachers could discipline students by hitting them with a leather strap. But for children without behaviour problems (usually girls), kindergarten was fun: there were paper dolls and cardboard bricks to play with. I learned how to paint, and my kind teacher praised me often and played the piano when she taught us songs. Every morning we sang “God Save the Queen” and recited the Lord’s Prayer.
Grade one was even more amazing. The teacher, Mrs. Macpherson, read or told us classic stories while teaching us to read. She told us the story of the entire bible from the creation to the second coming. She read us Alice in Wonderland in installments. She read The Cat in the Hat. I got none of this at home, and I got hooked on books and reading. I sat listening to her, mesmerized. I love bible stories, especially the stories from the old testament, to this day. She made Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau, Jonah, and Jesus come alive. After school I would read the stories in my picture bible and look at the color plates of renaissance paintings of biblical subjects reproduced in the volume. It was like she was setting me up for an education in the classics.
