Put down your books kids Its time to study the ways of the weasel

By Anson Cameron July 23, 2021 â€" 4.00pm

News comes to me that Brad Weasel is a multi-millionaire now. Multi-multi, they say. Many multis. Owns a grey-faced mansion in Toorak that looks like the illegitimate brainchild of Albert Speer. And yachts in both hemispheres. Something to do with computers, they say. Was in at the beginning. Or something to do with property development. Is strangely clairvoyant about rezoning and able to cut large blocks into small blocks more deftly than others. Brad Weasel has made it big. I never saw this coming.

He was a joker when I knew him. A disrupter of classes and a subverter of the ethos our teachers were trying to feed us, bit-by-bit, day-by day. Study hard, learn maths, know history, focus on the classics, the Greeks will teach you everything, read Shakespeare, respect the scientific method, work tirelessly at learning, especially at learning how to ask questions. But young Brad Weasel would rather tell a joke than do any of this. And he would rather tell a lie than a joke. I never saw him pick up a book.

He was obviously doomed. If we who toed the line were right, then he was wrong and hell-bound. He would sit up the back of class with a delinquent’s smile sketching cleavage, letting the pedagogical narrative blast past him like white noise from planet adult. He didn’t believe it. He wasn’t buying any of what the teachers were selling. Knowledge? Damn that. Expertise? That’s for the rubes who will one day remove the polyps from my colon. Somehow he knew early that big, important secrets were being kept from us and that Socrates was an irrelevant clown and the periodic table had wonky legs.

Credit:

Let’s say there were 20 in our final year class. Three would go on to become doctors, three would be cynical enough for law, four bright-eyed enough to become teachers, seven would enter family businesses after swearing not to, and one would fall from a horse â€" which leaves B. Weasel and me.

I just wanted to write. But even at 17 he recognised that as a cul-de-sac paved with vanity. And when I think of the broke writers I know, the brilliant minds able to recite Dante and Pope who write quintessentially Australian stories for the good of their own souls in Northcote rooms, I’ve got to say B. Weasel wasn’t as wrong as I’d like.

He was a salesman, essentially. A deal-cutter. He could look into your eyes and see your price. At school he would trade you for your lunch and leave you holding an emerald made of frozen Coola. Wilde derided those who knew the price of everything but the value of nothing. But in our capitalist society price equates so closely to value that deal-cutting weasels have become a species of prophet. They get ahead, these visionary rascals who see early that the rules of the game are not the rules we are taught.

Guys like Brad Weasel make me think our educators are in massive error. Or are pig-headedly repeating an indoctrination they suffered early. They are preparing their charges for a world they wish existed instead of the one that does. It’s like prepping kids to enter Narnia or Neverland. If you burden a child with morality, compassion, empathy and an aesthetic sensibility you make that child extremely vulnerable to the weasels.

What are the stone-faced educators who pulled their white socks knee-high while trying to convince young Brad Weasel of his looming doom to make of the fact that he has become king of the world? Did they grind their teeth back then, secretly knowing this heretic was onto something?

I admire my old cohortee Brad Weasel. Having the chutzpah to lean back in class and sketch cleavage while I tried to decode Joyce, knowing even then that there was a path in this world that led to the ownership of massive brutalist architecture and he would soon be on it, that Socrates and Zola might be names on the spines of books that help fill his library, but unless they could help him cozy up to a local councillor or two he wouldn’t be familiarising himself with their work. That’s wisdom very young. That’s wisdom in spite of being hosed with principled pedagogy. Most of us need help with weaseldom of that type. So why aren’t we educating our young to be sharp-eyed weasels? Because the weasels are ascendant. And pretending otherwise is junk.

Share this post