I’m sure you’ve all heard of some variation of this classic tale of how high school kills curiosity.

When I was little, I couldn’t get enough of reading. WWII history books, French short stories, maritime adventure novels — you name it, I read it. It was fun being lost in my own little world.

Really, two things about high school killed my vibe. First, I didn’t have the luxury of an afternoon to spend reading books that weren’t going to help my grades. Second, English classes sometimes turned reading into a painful ordeal. Annotating, journal-writing, interpreting quotes all made reading seem like work. And work wasn’t something I wanted to do in the little precious free time I had.

Worst of all, I could no longer lose myself in books, as they were no longer cheap portable experience machines, but rather lines of dull text to be picked apart and analyzed under the microscope.

It was an all-too-common story, and one of the great tragedies of high school — how a place of learning actually shuts off the greatest source of learning in the world. But if my story ended here, there would be no point in continuing. Instead, I once again became an avid reader, an even stronger one than I had been before.

The spark to pull myself out of not reading was starting Quiz Bowl in my senior year, a game that tests knowledge, with history and literature being a full half of the distribution. I knew that to excel, I would have to start reading again.

It was almost like work; it didn’t seem natural, it didn’t seem like fun. But my drive to win managed to overpower this initial resistance. Within a short amount of time, I started to like reading again.

I started out with novels: “A Passage to India” and “The Pearl” were ones I particularly enjoyed. Once I got going, I started branching out into short stories — I do recommend “Interpreter of Maladies” — and stuff like “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” which can best be described as a medical anthropology infused with short anecdotes about Hmong culture and history. None of these works I knew even existed just a few months ago. 

I liked reading not only for its escape value, but also because I truly wanted to learn. I discovered a great world of knowledge that wasn’t taught in school, and I wanted to know so much that my mind would become a cannon, able to cut through any BS that came my way. I wanted to explore and see everything I’d missed out on, and become a more cultured and educated person.

There’s so much schools don’t have the time to teach, so in reality, we leave school not knowing very much at all. Only through reading outside of school can we fill in those gaps.