High school was a very difficult time for me, but I was also extremely successful during this time. My parents had arrived in Canada only two years earlier, and it would be some time before the disruptive effects of their interference with my education would become apparent. I was very fortunate that for several years in elementary school — probably the most formative years of my life — I could learn from excellent teachers without my parents continually disparaging everything they taught me. I began high school very, very far ahead of my classmates, and I had gotten that way by doing precisely the very things that my parents would discourage and attempt to prevent me from doing during high school: reading books not on the school curriculum, learning things by actually doing them, going around talking to people with an interest or expertise in a subject, and so on.
There were three interweaving strands in my high school life: academics, school-related extracurricular activities, and interests altogether outside of school. I was very active, both academically and socially, during this period, and I can truly say that I was successful in high school in every sense of the word. Some people do well in school at the expense of their social lives, and others are popular but don’t get good grades. I was not only at the top of the class, I was also one of the most popular people in the entire school. (Of course this statement is very subjective, but I will cite as evidence in its favour the fact that I was the only person with perfect attendance at every social event at which I was present.) As everyone knows, in high school there are social cliques which, while not technically mutually exclusive (and thus are not real cliques according to the computer science usage of the term), have only a minimal degree of overlap. I was one of the few people who moved freely in and out of different cliques, and I always had more invitations to social events than I had time. I was also quite well known in other schools.
I think that people, and especially parents, who believe that academic success is incompatible with social popularity and extracurricular interests are not only wrong, but have it entirely backwards. I wasn’t just successful and popular, I was so successful precisely because I was so popular. The fact that I participated in a lot of activities and interacted with a lot of people both in and outside of school not only did not hinder my schooling, but was the very reason why I had such high grades to begin with. And this fact was something that my parents simply refused to accept. They began to attack me for this during high school, and they would keep up their attacks throughout my undergraduate years and even into graduate school. They just would not stop, despite being repeatedly shown to be wrong. I have accomplished a lot of amazing things in my life, and as I tell my story it will become crystal clear that I would have never had the chance to do any of those things if I had obeyed my parents. I have been successful precisely to the extent that I have been able to get away with doing what they forbade me from and even punished me for doing; and where I have failed, it has never been for any reason other than their interference.
People kept asking me in high school what was the secret to my success, and my answer was always the same: just do whatever you’re interested in doing. Of course, this can be very difficult with authoritarian parents who insist on controlling what can and cannot be studied at home. But what I found especially tragic was that I observed a lot of people who did not have authoritarian parents, and who essentially had the freedom to choose whatever they wanted to study, would nevertheless impose restrictions on themselves by choosing their courses based on what they think would please their parents or teachers, what credits they think universities expected them to have, and so on. My own experience has been that by studying what I found interesting, I always covered what I needed to learn for school as a side effect. In fact, I often ended up in positions where I had already finished doing something that I was then subsequently asked to do. Of course, I would then present the finished product in zero time and look like an absolute miracle worker.
I cannot emphasise enough just how wrong authoritarian parents are when they insist that spending time on interests outside of school results in lower grades, or that having an active social life is necessarily a distraction from school. In the next several posts, I will relate my own experiences of how these were actually the keys to my academic success.
– davinci
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