The Eagle Tree

by Ned Hayes

Education is not a living thing; it is an action that you perform to someone else to give them knowledge. And most of what I learn at ORLA is not knowledge. I have learned all about trees on my own, for example, and most of the time at school Mr. Gatek and other people seem to be telling me to stop learning so much about trees and stop talking so much about trees, and instead to do things that have no relationship in my mind to knowledge. They have me do art, even though I am not good at art. And they teach me the history of human beings, for which I cannot see an applicable purpose. Also, we read books that have very few facts in them, but instead have stories about things that could not happen. People try to explain the stories to me, but most of what they say sounds like how Pastor Ilsa explains the Bible to me, when she says it is “true” even though it is not factual. This is confusing.