There are many different ways to become "educated" and I took the most logical route: namely, I didn't go to school. That is, I'll admit that I did do a year of college. And, before that, two years of a decidedly unusual alternative highschool. And, before that, I once went to school for half a day in Grade Six. I learned from all three experiences; from my three-hour Grade Six experience I learned that being pelted with decapitated snakes is actually a form of flirtation among eleven-year-old boys. In highschool, I learned that algebra is much less fun than being pelted with snakes. In college I learned that some things are best left untouched, and that sociology is one of them. But, aside from these briefest of brushes with the terrifying world of academia, I've remained happily unscathed by the public school system.

   And how does one manage to elude the school system? Well, honestly, I'd have to say "sheer luck". I don't remember exactly why I never went to school, but rumour has it that little Emily was not only rabidly shy, but allergic to chalk dust. Since I was allergic to everything else anyways and my sister was being plagued by schoolyard bullies, it seemed like a good enough excuse at the time. And so it was decided, that September, that I wouldn't be going to school at all.

   For a time we plodded through correspondence courses; in my kindergarten year I dutifully coloured in pictures of pumpkins in October, robins in the spring, and christmas trees in winter. I did small pointless science experiments, kept a catalogue of dead leaves, and decided that I hated math.

   Upon completion of the primary readers, Robert Louis Stevenson seemed like the logical next step, so I slipped from Dick and Jane into Treasure Island. Curiously, I remember it more vividly than any book I've ever read; for six months I immersed myself in a world of pirates and gunpowder and ships, of mutinous sailors and islands in the sea. Now, nearly everyone launches into the classics at some point, but at this particular point I happened to be seven years old. And so that year we dropped correspondence altogether, and set off on an unorthodox curriculum of our own.

   My "education", from that point on, consisted almost entirely of reading. I consumed books at a rate which sent the library card-swiping machine into a tizzy, staggering out of the library with twenty books at a time balanced precariously on my arms. My days were spent exploring in the woods or playing the piano, dancing at the local ballet school or reading alone, canoeing with my dad to what seemed like far-off lands. My career aspirations altered daily; if memory serves I was usually planning on being an acrobat, a famous painter, a ballerina, or sometimes all three. To complicate matters, I was also an enthusiastic writer, if a sickeningly cute one;

   And so it continued, for years and years and years. There was, however, a nagging problem: despite my mother's best efforts, I was showing no particular inclination towards mathematical brilliance. At fifteen, I was still happily unburdened by any knowledge of the times tables, a fact that didn't concern me greatly. My mother, meanwhile, was concerned about The Future -- an uncertain place populated by Educational Opportunities, where the ability to recite ones' times tables on demand could prove to be all-important when you least expected it. And thus one day I found myself in the small grey office of an alternative highschool, with a soft-spoken instructor who gazed abstractedly at my application while he stroked his beard.

   "Now as you're probably aware," he said, "this program is for highschool drop-outs, you need to have been out of school for three months to qualify. How long ago did you drop out?"

   "I never went," I answered softly.

   There was an interesting silence.

   "Well then," he said, when he'd recovered. "I guess you'd qualify for our program, then..."

   City Centre was pleasant enough, but it quickly became clear that if I was to get into a professional dance program in Toronto, my dream school half a continent away, I would need much more than an equivelancy certificate. And so two years later, I enrolled in college.

   There are many reasons why I will never go back to college. In order for anyone else to understand them, I must first make it clear that my "homeschooling" had little to do with either "schooling" or "home". Beyond the occasional useless math drill, I was never "schooled", there was no need for it -- immersed in an introspective world of Isaac Asimov and Beethoven, of forests and dance and private games, I was constantly and unceasingly absorbing knowledge. Once I'd decided to pursue and learn something, it never would have occurred to me to achieve anything less than perfection.

   In college, it was immediately obvious that not only was I not expected to acheive perfection, but that my concept of "mediocre" perfectly matched most of my instructors' definitions of "excellent". My classmates had been churned out by the mainstream public school system; for them it wasn't a matter of wanting to learn things, it was more a matter of surviving the next exam. My enthusiasm for knowledge was rapidly dampened. Consumed by an overwhelmingly insane schedule, my evenings were a nightmarish frenzy of studying. Whole nights would pass as I drowned in essays, there was always too much left to be done. Looking back at my notes from last year, sometimes a sentence will suddenly slope downhill -- that was where I literally fell asleep while writing. When I staggered into the exam room after two hours of sleep, it was always with the distinct impression that the world was ending. I would write my exam, the hours flying by as I scribbled frantically, and leave convinced of my spectacular failure. When the shining transcripts arrived a week later I'd find myself gazing blankly at them, aware that all those A+'s were supposed to make it all worthwhile, and equally aware that they didn't come close.

   I remember a day in a lake when I was twelve, when I grew desperately tired and nearly drowned. I'd have to say, looking back, that college was a fairly similar experience. The clincher came on a morning near the end of the term, when my final Sociology paper was returned to me. I had stayed up til 4:30 a.m. writing it, dragged myself out of bed an hour and a half later to catch the ferry to school. And less than four hours after going to bed, there I was; studying at a table in the Quiet Study Area, fairly convinced that I was going to die of exhaustion. All egotism aside, it wasn't a bad paper; my mark was 97%. But my instructor had written, as part of the comments, that he "could barely do better" himself. If I, as an exhausted first-year seventeen-year-old, could almost equal someone who had been through the entire university system, then what hope did I ever have of learning anything from it? My inevitable conclusion was that I was wasting my time, and wasting my time is one of the few things that I have no patience for.

   I was enrolled in "school" for all of nine months. How do people who go through the entire public school system, from kindergarten to graduation, stand it? I'll never know. Now my days are spent in studios; I'm dancing in a professional dance school half a continent away. And despite my briefest of brushes with the academic world, I'm sometimes astonished at how lucky I was; to avoid being categorized by age and shut into a classroom with 30 similarly bored peers, to avoid the futility of countless exams, to be allowed to learn the things that I wanted to know -- I don't think such a thing is comparable to the best school in the whole wide world.

   ...And neither did I. I never did get around to learning my times tables, and I suspect that I probably never will. But if this is The Future, then I don't regret the past.