My parents were suspicious of any conventional toys I may ask for. When they took me on vacation to a sea resort in the summer, I told them that I too wanted some of the little toy cars the other children were playing with on the beach. My father promptly gave me a long and detailed explanation on how toy cars are crypto-fascist instruments of capitalist propaganda. Being the instinctively cynical person I've always been, I thought he just didn't want to buy me a new toy. I was wrong: within a few days I got a large supply of toy excavators, trucks, bulldozers, cranes, tractors and all the imaginable forms of progressive and proletarian motorized vehicles.
Admittedly, an excavator is a lot more fun than a racing car for playing in the sand!
When one day during my first years in school I came home to my mother boasting that I was the best in the class, she beat the hell out of me, telling me (rightly) that one learns things for the pleasure of knowledge and not out of a desire to be better than other people. She yelled at me and insulted me, saying that I was an individualist. Not that, at the time, I had a completely clear idea of what "individualist" meant, but it was certainly something akin to "filthy worm crawling in the mud".
The most serious drawback with this type of education is the fact that I grew up in a world which does not exist and never did. Communism was a beautifully concocted fairytale of the modern era, but its proletarian workers paradise was no more real than dragons, wizards, and princesses of the fairytales of old. More desirable perhaps, more interesting, but certainly no more real.
I believe this contributed substantially in generating that feeling of misplacement that accompanied me through most of my life. In the beginning of my school years, this combined with the fact that I was out of phase with the pace of school education, and surrounded by other children whose families couldn't have been more remote from the world my parents belonged to.
People familiar with other educational systems may at this point wonder why I did not simply enroll directly in the third or fourth instead of the first grade in school, if I was already substantially ahead with things like reading and writing. It seems like a natural idea, but in the country where I grew up this is explicitly forbidden by the law. One cannot enroll in the year (N+1)-st of school education unless one has already attended all the years from 1 to N.
I was told that the reason for this regulation is to prevent parents from creating freak child prodigies who are total social misfits. One has to consider whether it is more alienating to be in the company of children of the same age with whom you have very little in common to communicate, or to be surrounded by slightly older children who share a number of similar experiences.
My social skills with the other children had improved slightly from the preschool days. I had by then learned that there are other possible modes of interaction besides physical confrontation, but I still had a sense of unease. They showed me toys whose purpose and meaning I did not understand, and they seemed even more baffled by the ones I showed them. They talked a great deal about things that had something or another to do with TV, but when I started commenting on how interesting the cathodic tube was, they would go off and talk to someone else.
The trouble is that to me TV, for the very brief period of my life when there was one in the house, was a very interesting machine and it fascinated me like other mechanical devices that belonged to the world of adults, but it never was anything more than that. I think I must have been directly responsible for its final demise.
It was a very old apparatus, sitting precariously on a small coffee table in the corner of a room. Black and white only, of course. The process of turning it on was the most interesting thing about it. It took a good twenty minutes to complete. At first, nothing happened and the screen remained dark. Then, after a few minutes, a minute spec of light appeared in the middle of the screen. It stayed there, mute, shining without anything better to do. Slowly (very slowly) the small bright dot grew in size until the whole screen shone of white light. This wasn't it yet. At this point the object simply appeared to be a table lamp, but another transformation was taking place. The white light transformed itself in horizontal lines of gray, that moved up and down the screen and finally these turned into images and sounds. At that point it ceased to be interesting and I usually switched it off again. I must have been switching it on and off so many times, just to look closely at the process by which the cathodic tube lit up, that pretty soon it broke down irreparably and that was it. My parents were waiting for a good excuse to get rid of the TV-set anyway, since TV also did not fit very well with the principles of ideological education, so they never made any attempt to replace it.
That was the last time when I had direct access to TV. The next time in my life when I watched something at my place was in Boston in 1999, when I put the first DVD I ever bought (the movie Dr.Strangelove) into the drive of my desktop computer. In between, I had to do with the occasional TV watching at a friend's place, in my teens, after some study session. Did I miss anything? You tell me.
