Life Skills Class

For my parents' generation, deference to the educator was a virtue. They could not have conceived of a time, when instructors would subvert the family unit and try to warp the values of their charges. At University School, this dichotomy reared its head: listen to my parents telling me to listen to my teachers or listen to my teachers telling me to rebel against my parents. As a freshman, I took, at my parents' behest, a class called "life skills". My parents had been led to believe that the course was about balancing checkbooks and that sort of thing. In fact, we never discussed checkbooks. There was open advocacy for experimenting with drugs. A lesbian was brought to class, vibrator in hand, to advocate alternative lifestyles. At fourteen, I am being instructed that sexual orientation is a choice and I and my classmates needed to try all our options. We visited the Planned Parenthood abortion mill. Perhaps, the most damaging and age-inappropriate indoctrination we received was at the Vanderbilt medical school morgue. First, the director of the morgue, either British or Australian by his accent, met us in a conference room. His assistant, I believe a humpback but that may be my imagination, brought in a covered tray like those used in Chinese restaurants. This did not contain lunch but a formaldehyde-preserved anencephaly baby who had been born with no excretory organs and only a brain stem. Dr. Macabre asked us why the baby died. Someone said because she could not empty her bladder/bowel. Doc said surgeons could have made excretory organs for her, but she was allowed to die because of her underdeveloped brain. Reeked of murder to me. Then it was on to the real show. One girl opted out at this point but the rest of us, me included, visited the morgue proper. Here medical students were dissecting corpses, some donated, some indigent. A young female medical student is tying some poor woman's vein to her tendon in a braid fashion-I asked her why and am told because the future MD likes the color contrast of the blue and the red. I notice the green beans and carrots intact and undigested in the decedent's stomach. It put me off mixed vegetables for a long time. Shocking, nightmare-inducing but absolutely typical of a bunch of leftists trying to inculcate these children from affluent backgrounds to hate and disobey their parents who were paying large tuition, lawful authority, and generally lose the reverence for life that normal, moral people possess. At USN, you were taught to resent the very wealth that enabled you to attend. My time at University School was my first experience with contemporary American liberalism.