Perhaps as in punishment for some sins of my own era, fate, or some more divine essence, tore me from the peaceful electric skies of my own day and tossed me into the primordial soup of time. Regardless of the agent by which such an endeavor was undertaken, it was in true Dickens fashion that this hell was revealed to me so that through the improvement of myself my own world could and would be made more of a heaven.
We commenced upon this endeavor (that is to say that I commenced, though I was surely accompanied by that unrevealed divine breathe that had placed me here) with a visit to the sparkling-white Alexandria of the public education system. While the politics, fashion, language, and tastes that I encountered in this foreign world were of the utmost cultural peculiarity, I found most interesting the apish technology that was implemented by this primitive civilization.
While I was familiar myself, though only on a very basic and trivial level, with most of these instruments and mechanisms, (though I judge that my understanding of these machines was even greater than the understanding of the natives, for there was a common consensus among those aborigines that held that the best manner in which to operate or even to repair any of these devices was to beat it over a solid surface in the most savage manner) I found one very simplistic device to be both enthralling and foreign to me. This apparatus, composed of countless pieces of parchment bound together, no doubt, from some sort of sap collected from local trees, appeared in the possession of every single individual within this place of learning, and, additionally, each student seemed not only to retain one book but usually two or three.
At first glance, I thought them to be some sort of media in which to communicate that vital information that always circulates through such places of education. However, I quickly discerned the error of this assumption after observing several pupils using these entities, which they seemingly christened “books”, as supports to stabilize their desks which often had legs that were uneven. Furthermore, at the door of many rooms I observed these books being used as doorstops, and, in similar fashion, I frequently saw them placed upon desks to be used as a paperweight. Inside the class room students also utilized these objects as multipurpose combatants of boredom.
Oftentimes when a student would become uninterested in some discussion of a critically important topic these books would provide entertainment as pupils would go about ripping edges or reveling in the sound of a page being slowly torn from its moorings. Occasionally the books would be used as a crude replacement for such weapons as a club or rock.
With all of this in mind I came to the realization that these scrolls were more or less blocks. They had no distinct purpose, but were actually playthings given to those in schools in order to stimulate the imagination: in essence books were educational “legos” that students used in any manner that they believed appropriate. Thus still retaining the ghosts of this venture, I propose that we implement in our schools some sort of creative canvas, much like books, that can supplement those materials that are now in use.
