We hate school

Here we go! Join me as we journey on a path back in time and reminisce about old school escapades. They are immense; from nursery school all the way through primary, secondary, university, really cannot mention it all as they say schooling never ends.

Very few of us ever wanted to start school or continue with it for that matter. A number of us were always dragged from our front doors to be taken to nursery school. Living in flats in my childhood, you could hear screams emanating from every corner. This was an episode many mornings of the week as little kids were forcefully shoved into their daddy’s cars, some dragged across the pavements by their nannies to be taken to the kindergarten. I can tell your laughing very hard now because you must have been one of these. One would be forgiven to mistake this saga for kidnap and would run quickly to their rescue. Only after a close look would one realize that these little kids just hated the whole idea of leaving their comfy beds only to go learn A B C for a big part of the day. Yet they wanted to stay behind, roll in mud and play ‘gogolo’.

We all became creative in coming up with ways to skip school. You would forge sickness and say you did not feel well. However you would be lucky to get away with only an aspirin. Some kids were not so lucky; they were taken to the clinic and oh ho! When they got there, a few were bold enough to go through every checkup until they were declared okay but the doctor would prescribe a few drugs anyway just to expand your bill. The other kids however, when told they were being taken to the clinic, they pictured the mean old ‘musawo’ going for his huge injection and pressing out a few drops. Aha! They would then scream and immediately confess that they were not very sick, that the clinic was not necessary. With the increasing episodes, parents learnt and started using ‘musawo’ as the litmus test to stop kids in their lying tracks in a bid to skip school.

As we grew older through primary and secondary school, the creativity skyrocketed. But being childish creativity, looking back now some of it if not most was nothing short of being utterly silly. Like there was a girl who was caught hanging out in the toilets just to skip classes. It then took to lying to parents that it was a school holiday the following day. When we were declared capable of going to school by ourselves, we then made diversions to other places like playfields where we played football until school time was over. We would then take a ‘quick shower’, put our uniforms back on and head back home as if after a long day of study.

At one point or another, each of us has come up with an excuse to skip school. However, nowadays we have transformed some of these excuses to skip work, meetings, dates and so on. But we all know their origin, don’t we?