I didn’t care much for school. In fact, I hated it.
“Who needs school?” I asked aloud.
If these were the best years of my life, I don’t give much for the rest. I sat in the rabbit hole. The rabbit wasn’t there. I was still wearing my school clothes as I had gone straight to the rabbit warren from school instead of going home and getting changed.
My parents had told me that I had to go to school and that I would enjoy it as they would be the best years of my life. Well, playing games was better than sitting in a dumb classroom listening to some drivel that didn’t make no sense, I thought.
Eventually, the rabbit came. “I’m pleased that the drivel you learned at school made sense to you.”
“What?” Sometimes I never knew what the rabbit was talking about.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
Ignoring my question the rabbit said, “If it didn’t make no sense, then it obviously made some sense.”
Ignoring the rabbit, I said, “I asked where you’ve been.”
“I’ve been teaching some young rabbits how to dig good solid tunnels,” said the rabbit proudly. “They have to be built above the watershed and in such a way that if it rains, the water will drain away, especially from the nesting areas. There should always be an escape route that consists of divided tunnels so that if a ferret entered the system and a rabbit was running to escape, the rabbit would always take a tunnel that wasn’t straight ahead. The chances are that the ferret would run straight.”
The rabbit went on for hours, well a long time at least, with facts on soil types, depths, what to do in the event of a tunnel collapse and so on. I was totally intrigued by this because I thought a rabbit hole was just a hole, nothing more. His enthusiasm was what really kept me interested, especially after he had spent all day teaching the young rabbits.
“How do you keep up your...your...”
“Enthusiasm?”
“Yes - that!”
“Oh, I don’t. The young rabbits couldn’t care less. I only got enthusiastic when you got interested,” explained the rabbit.
“I can see that going to school teaches me things that I don’t know but I don’t understand why I have to know everything. After all, I won’t have to dig a rabbit hole, will I?”
“What do you want to do when you leave school?” inquired the rabbit.
“I don’t know, so why don’t I just wait until I have decided what I want to do, and then I can learn just that, and that will save a lot of time learning useless stuff that I don’t need to know?”
“Yes, you are absolutely right,” said the rabbit, somewhat dismayed. “That’s exactly what the young rabbits said about digging holes.”
“So why not?” I asked.
“Why were you so interested in how we built rabbit holes when you have no ambition to build a rabbit hole?”
“I don’t know. It was interesting,” I replied.
“But the chances are that you will never have to build a rabbit hole, so wasn’t all that information useless? You are going to school to learn some basic facts, but what is more important at this stage of your life is that you are also going to school to learn how to learn.”
“If I knew all the facts in the world, I would be intelligent,” I boasted.
“A library has more facts inside its walls than you will ever learn in a hundred lifetimes. Does that make the library intelligent? Do you just want to be a walking reference machine?”
The rabbit was getting agitated.
“I have a cousin or somebody who asks a lot of questions and they say that she is intelligent.” “She might be intelligent,” said the rabbit, “but asking a lot of questions doesn’t necessarily mean that she is intelligent, nor does it imply that she is inquisitive. It might just simply mean that she asks a lot of questions. What does she do with the information that she gathers from her inquisitive nature?”
“Her what nature?”
“Her inquisitive nature - her question asking.”
“Oh. She just asks another question. She never stops.”
“If there is a structure to her questions then her mind is gathering information, deducing and forming a conclusion or opinion, but to ask questions needlessly is a total waste of time. Sometimes people make the mistake of associating curiosity with intelligence. They even confuse the ability to remember, with knowledge.”
“What?”
“We had a rabbit once that knew where every tunnel led to, how long it was, who dug it, and when it was dug. He was amazing, but he had no clue as to how to dig a hole. But coming back to your cousin - even if she is remembering the answers, you have to remember that most of everything you know is wrong, inaccurate, or out of date. That is, it may have was true once but is no longer true.”
“Yes, I remember you telling me that once before. How much is most?”
“Probably as much as nine times out of ten.”
“It is? How much is that?”
“Hold up your fingers,” said the rabbit.
I held them up.
“Now take one away.”
“I can’t. They’re fixed on.”
“Fold one down.”
I did that.
“Now you have nine fingers sticking up.”
“Right.”
“That represents nine out of ten. Nine-tenths of everything people think that they know is wrong, inaccurate or out of date.”
. . .
I enjoyed the next day at school. It was the last day before the holidays. We all had to stand up one at a time and tell the teacher and all the other kids about something interesting. I told the class how rabbits made rabbit holes. The teacher had asked how I knew so much about rabbits. I had told her that I had a good teacher. She seemed confused by my answer, but later that year I got a report card giving me marks for enthusiasm and having a vivid imagination.