Clinging to the Banister: Why Gentle, Curious Kids Fight School
It is one of the most baffling puzzles a parent or teacher can face; a child who clearly loves to learn, devours books at home, asks endless questions about how the world works, and yet falls apart the moment they walk through the school gates.
When a child resists school, we are quick to assume they lack drive, discipline, or curiosity. Rarely do we stop to ask whether the child is rejecting learning itself, or simply suffocating inside the container we have built for it.
My own experience, though many years ago, was of the system labelling me a truant, a disciplinary problem to be corrected. In truth, I was not running away from learning; I was running away from the prison of schooling.
Following my parents' move from South to West London, I encountered a secondary modern school for the first time, and with it, a level of daily chaos I simply couldn’t process. Every forty minutes, a bell rang and the entire school emptied into the corridors to swap rooms. Between the noise, the jostling, kids packing up early and straggling in late, my mind simply could not handle this constant sensory churn and my fight or flight response kicked in.
I just had to get out.
Before long, I began swapping my lunch money for a red bus rover, heading back into South and Central London to learn in municipal libraries and museum galleries. When the weather was good, I boarded the 90B bus and rode it to Kew Gardens, where an old copper penny bought entry through the gates, and I would sit on the grass for hours, working my way through schoolbooks and untangling my thoughts in the quiet.
That was where I realised I was a peripatetic learner. The peripatetic tradition, dating back to Aristotle pacing the walkways of the Lyceum, recognises that thought is physical. Some minds simply freeze under fluorescent strip lights behind a wooden desk. They need cadence, rhythm, and horizon. To solve complex problems, you have to move through space and let your feet measure the ground while your subconscious untangles the knot. Wandering the paths of Kew taught me to understand reality by watching living, breathing systems rather than memorising abstract formulas on a blackboard.
Of course, the obvious question is whether I missed out on the benefits of a formal education. My school reports told the whole story, they consistently marked me E for effort, the lowest possible grade at the time, right alongside top marks in the exams. To the school, that was an anomaly to be disciplined. To me, it laid the game bare. I saw effort as simply the institution’s word for obedience, sitting still, looking at the blackboard, and performing compliance. The exam results proved the learning was happening.I was simply doing it on my own terms, on the pathways of Kew and in public libraries.
At the same time, I am acutely aware of the trap of survivorship bias. It is easy to romanticise stepping off the conveyor belt, and I am certainly not making a reckless argument that kids should abandon school. A kid wired the way I was, with high pattern recognition, an innate drive, and carrying all his books around London in his bag, is in a very different position from a teenager who simply checks out.
My story isn't an argument for rebellion; it is an argument for self-awareness over obedience. When an institution treats sitting still as the primary measure of ability, it blinds itself to how different minds actually operate. If we pretend that one rigid classroom model works for everyone, we fail both the children who are crushed by the desk and the children who cannot find their way to the grass at Kew.
If you are watching a curious child struggle with school, or carrying the scars of feeling like a misfit in the classroom yourself, take heart. Sometimes the appetite for learning is completely intact; it just needs a different kind of room to breathe.
In my next post, I’ll be writing about what happens when the system decides to name that difference and why the impact of a label comes down to one simple question.
Who is holding the pen?
