My Fondest Childhood Memory

Here you'll find my attempt at a post with the aforementioned title, as suggested by Absurd Pirate via our post title trade! Read more about the initiative, or contact me if you'd also like to trade!

I taught myself world history as a kid. Not because I was 'gifted', 'smart', or an 'overachiever', but because the school library presented me with my equivalent of catnip: Horrible Histories.

In primary school, I did well-ish on most subjects, not so great on others, but how I loved to learn. Given what I'm aware of now, no wonder I struggled to study in that environment: all these folks talking, fluorescent lights too bright and too loud, caring to much about too little.

Call it underfunding, call it a lack of interest, but I never remember much focus on the humanities. Which, of course, is the group of subjects that've always intrigued me the most.

If we learned about them during class, it'd be fifteen-minute snatches dribbled out through the course of weeks. I've never been physically hyperactive, but my brain? Perhaps yes. So, my head needed more knowledge and things to chew on. Connecting the dots across time.

So I went to the school library and discovered Horrible Histories. They're perhaps more of a commonwealth phenomenon than an American one, but you've perhaps heard of them. Those books with their garish covers, gleeful irreverence, and gory cartoons.

Sometimes, during lunch, they'd keep the library open. How I loved those days! Sit cross-legged on the industrial carpet, surrounded by the books I'd pulled from the shelves.

This is how I learned history isn't a straight line. Everything touches everything else: trade routes, plagues, artistic movements, and the price of salt. The books let me see it all at once.

Don't get me wrong, I don't wish to disparage the Australian education system, that school, or my teachers, who did so much for me with the limited resources they had. Still…I suppose there's grief there every time that happens. A child teaching themselves or getting left behind by the system.

But I can't deny it's perhaps one of the best things I did for my childhood self, even if that hadn't been the intention. I was just overwhelmed yet bored and wanted an escape.

It taught me to stay curious and treat learning with reverence, yet never take it too seriously.

And for that, I'll be forever grateful to those books.