I became an intellectual delinquent

Somebody not just anybody told this story:

When I was seven, I lived in Whitstable in Kent, England, and attended a boy's school. My only interest then was nature study. I loved animals and nature and so did my best friend Barry. We would wait for school to finish so that we could be with nature and animals. We used to keep rabbits, cats, dogs, fish, spiders and butterflies. Our houses were like little zoos.

Barry was very extraordinary. He could identify birds by their flight pattern. He is now a conservationist and drives a lorry.

In school, Barry and I were put into different streams; he was in 1D and I was in 1A. We were told that it made no difference which class we were in, as it was determined in random.

But it did not take us long to figure out that 1A was for bright boys and 1D stood for the so-called "dull" ones. Yet, at the age, you do not particularly think about it.

In class, the teacher made us sit according to our placing in class. So the top student would sit at the first table on the right and everyone else snaked all the way to the front.

My classmates, Mummery and Epps, were always in seat one or two. I never sat there until I received a perfect score for a test on nature.

Fot that exam, our teacher had asked us, among other questions, to name two types of fish in the English stream and the difference between a butterfly and a moth.

I did not think it was a "real" test because it was easy for me. I could have given the teacher 60 types of fish and 15 differences between a butterfly and a moth if he had asked.

Two weeks later, my teacher came back with the results and announced that I did better than thr rest. So, for the first time, Iwas looking at the right profiles of Mummery and Epps in class.

I soon understood that they did well in geographyor English because they liked those subjects as I did nature. That, for a while made me proud to be No.1.

But after that, I had the realisation that changed my life. I felt embarassed for thinking that I was No.1 when sitting 140 seats down from me in the front row of 1D was my best friend Barry.

I knew that Barry knew more about nature than me and he was suppoedly the dumbest of the dumb.

I realised that the education system was not measuring our intelligence or teaching us how to learn.

Thereafter, I became an intellectual delinquent. I began asking questions like "who says one is smart?" and "what does smart mean?' and "why?"

My interest in intelligence flowered from that event.