DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 9

The Economics Essays

I was sitting in Mr Saunders’ office with the distinct feeling that I had done something wrong, although nobody had quite managed to tell me what it was. That is one of the more effective forms of interrogation, especially on a schoolboy who already carries enough self-doubt to furnish a small courtroom. You are placed in a chair, the adult sits on the other side of the desk with papers in front of him, and the room begins doing the accusing before the conversation has had the decency to start.

The papers were there, which did not help. They were not just papers by then, and they were certainly not innocent examples of schoolwork waiting to be marked with the usual red pen and tired disappointment. They had become evidence, and evidence always looks more serious once it is lying on a teacher’s desk with a little space around it. A sheet of foolscap, a paragraph, a margin, a sentence in my handwriting, all of it had been promoted from helpful notes to something close to Exhibit A in the matter of Banks and the Four Footballers.

Mr Saunders was not raging, and in a strange way that probably made it worse. Rage announces itself clearly enough, and even a boy can understand where he stands when the adult in front of him is red in the face and keen to get through the performance. This was quieter than that, more measured, and therefore more dangerous to my imagination. He seemed to be trying to work out whether I was a villain, an idiot, a victim, or some peculiar mixture of the three, and I suspect the mixture was nearest the mark even if I would have argued over the percentages.

He asked me whether I had written the essays, and I said that I had. There was little point pretending otherwise when my own handwriting was sitting there looking back at me like a small treacherous friend. I had always had a fairly distinctive hand, helped along by the sort of penmanship awards that seem important in primary school and become less useful once one of the great thinkers of the football department decides to submit your writing as his own. It is a curious thing to be betrayed by neatness, but schools had a talent for making even your better habits stand up and testify against you.

That was the detail which moved the whole business from schoolyard foolishness into office furniture. Four boys had come to me with trial Higher School Certificate economics questions and asked me to help them prepare essays. They were studying the subject, and I was not, which should have been enough to stop the plan at birth if any of us had been operating under the influence of reason. Teenage boys, however, are not famous for their loyalty to procedure, and I was not famous for refusing the chance to be useful when usefulness looked as though it might lead me closer to the doorway of belonging.

They were gun footballers, which mattered in that world in a way marks never quite did. They moved through the school with a kind of approved weight, not necessarily arrogance in every case, but a certainty of place that was visible even when they were doing nothing more dramatic than leaning against a wall or walking across the playground. Their names travelled ahead of them, and their bodies made sense to other boys in a way a quick answer in class rarely did. Their talent was visible on Saturdays, in the playground, in the little sideways nods teachers gave to boys who might bring glory to the school before they brought trouble to the classroom.

I do not say that with bitterness alone, because I liked sport and I respected ability. I knew what it was to want the ball, to feel a contest tighten, and to have the body do something cleanly before the mind could arrive and spoil it by explaining the mechanics. Sporting ability gave boys a language that needed no translation, and I understood its attraction because I had known moments when it gave me a temporary passport into rooms that otherwise inspected me at the door. Even so, there was a hierarchy in those days, as there probably is in every school, and football sat on one of the upper shelves while academic ability, unless properly hidden or converted into something useful to the group, had a more complicated address.

So when four of them came to me, it was not a small thing. It was not friendship exactly, although I probably tried to dress it up as that in my own mind because I needed the warmth of the illusion. It was a request, and inside that request sat a kind of recognition, however limited and transactional it may have been. They needed something I had, and although they may not have valued the person attached to it, they had at least located the function, which can feel dangerously close to acceptance when you are a boy standing a little outside the circle.

They had trial economics essay questions, and I remember the rough shape of the matter better than the exact wording. That is probably just as well, because the education department may still have a file somewhere marked “Do Not Reopen,” and I have no desire to give it any encouragement. They needed responses prepared, something they could take in as notes, something they could learn, shape, or in their less ambitious interpretation, copy onto the test sheets. I do not know whether I asked too many questions about the mechanics of the arrangement, though I suspect I did not, because asking too many questions has often been the moment where other people discover the full machinery running behind my eyes and start backing away.

I had not studied economics, but the questions made sense to me quickly, and that was the surprise I did not fully recognise at the time. I read them and felt the little internal click that happens when a system reveals itself, not as a miracle, but as an arrangement of parts. It was not genius descending through the ceiling in a beam of light while angels whispered about supply and demand, which would have been both dramatic and a serious breach of school maintenance standards. It was structure, cause and effect, incentive and consequence, pressure and response, and people making choices under constraint before pretending the result had arrived from nowhere.

That suited my mind, although I did not know how much it suited my mind until I saw it sitting there under another subject name. Economics, at that level at least, was not a foreign country so much as a familiar room with the furniture arranged differently. Yes, there was terminology, and yes, a proper student of the subject would have had class notes, teachers, definitions and the comfort of having been led along the official path. But once I found the door, I could walk around inside it, see where an argument had to begin, where it had to turn, where an example belonged, and how a conclusion could land without looking as if it had fallen off the back of a truck.

There was a pleasure in that, and I should not pretend otherwise simply because the circumstances became embarrassing. I enjoyed the handling of the questions, the ordering of the answers, and the feeling of the page becoming less hostile as the argument took shape. The questions that were supposed to belong to someone else’s course became little problems to solve, and solving problems was one of the few places where I felt cleanly myself. There was no social awkwardness on the page, because the page did not care whether I was popular, whether I had the right haircut, whether I had arrived from the wrong bus route, or whether I was trying too hard to be tolerated.

I wrote the essays gladly, and that is the part which still carries its own small sting. I was not dragged into it, bullied into producing work, or threatened with some schoolyard punishment if I refused. I helped because helping offered me a doorway, and I was young enough, lonely enough, or hopeful enough to confuse a doorway with an invitation. It was a vain attempt to fit in, but vanity is not always the strutting thing we imagine; sometimes it is quieter and sadder, and it looks very much like the hope that usefulness might finally be mistaken for belonging.

Looking back, the whole arrangement has an innocence so foolish it almost deserves a glass cabinet. Four footballers came to the boy who was not taking economics so he could write their economics essays, and somehow this seemed to everyone involved to be a workable educational strategy. As I understood it, they were to take the notes or essays into the exam, learn from them or use them as a guide, and reproduce enough of the thinking on the test sheets to survive the exercise. That version of the plan still had some optimism in it, but schools are built partly on optimism and partly on the belief that boys will suddenly develop judgement when given lined paper and a time limit.

One of them, however, apparently decided that transcription was an unnecessary middleman. He did not carefully copy the work into his own hand, adjust a few phrases, insert a couple of spelling errors, or make any of the other small efforts required by a boy hoping to avoid detection. He simply handed in my writing, with my words and my hand doing all the work while his own contribution appeared to be confidence of a sort rarely seen outside politics. There is laziness, and then there is laziness with a death wish and a stationery allowance.

This is why I was now in Mr Saunders’ office, not exactly in trouble per se, but placed near enough to trouble to feel its breath on my face. The four boys had been asked to leave school over the incident, which gave the whole thing a gravity I had not anticipated when I was sitting somewhere else turning their questions into answers. Asked to leave school is one of those phrases adults use when the truth has put on a tie and wants to appear civilised. It sounds almost polite, as though the boys had been invited to pursue other opportunities, but at school it had the weight of a trapdoor.

I remember feeling frightened, although fright was not the only thing in the room with me. There was confusion as well, because I had not gone into an examination room, signed another boy’s name, or personally handed in anything pretending to be his work. I had written answers to questions, perhaps too complete, perhaps too useful, and perhaps with the wrong amount of faith in what would happen next. Yet there I was, sitting under the shadow of consequences, feeling once again that my mind had moved faster than the room could safely contain.

Mr Saunders wanted to know why I had done it, and that was not an easy question to answer truthfully. The truthful answer would have exposed more than the incident itself, and schoolboys are not famous for offering up their private loneliness as evidence. I could have said that boys like that did not usually ask me for anything except to move, shut up, pass the ball, or be useful in some temporary way. I could have said that, for once, my ability seemed like currency in a country where I was usually broke, and I thought being needed might feel enough like being liked to get me through the day.

I probably said something smaller, because boys usually do when the larger truth would make them feel naked. I may have said I was only helping, which was true, but not the whole truth, and perhaps not even the most important part of it. Only helping is one of those phrases that can cover a multitude of motives when you are young and still learning which parts of yourself are safe to declare. I was helping them, but I was also helping myself toward the edge of a group that had not exactly opened its arms, and I was trying to stand near the circle without being laughed back to the fence.

That was the absurdity of it, although absurdity is rarely kind enough to arrive on its own. The same school culture that could sneer at academic ability when it made others uncomfortable could still use that ability when it became convenient. Intelligence was embarrassing until someone needed an essay, socially dangerous until it could rescue a mark, and acceptable only when it had been reduced, hidden, laughed off, or converted into a service. Then it had value, but only for as long as the person providing it did not ask for recognition, warmth, friendship, or any of the other unreasonable extras boys pretend not to need.

I do not want to make the four boys into villains, because that would be too easy and probably too unfair. They were schoolboys trying to survive their own pressures, with football sitting like a crown on their heads and exams circling like unpaid bills. They needed help, saw where it might be obtained, and took their chance in the blunt practical way boys often do before life teaches them to dress self-interest in better language. I understand that more generously now than I did then, although perhaps even then I understood enough to know that people use the tools available to them, and a quiet boy with a restless mind can begin to look very much like a tool.

What hurt was not simply that I had been used, because the world uses all of us in one way or another and school is only the first clumsy rehearsal. What hurt was the shape of the transaction, the way my mind could be invited in while the rest of me remained outside. The essays could cross the boundary, but the boy who wrote them still belonged on the wrong side of it, waiting to see whether usefulness would be enough to soften the rules. They wanted the answer without the complication of recognising the person who had found it, and I was young enough to feel the difference before I had the language to explain it.

That sounds more bitter than I want it to sound, because something else was happening under the embarrassment. I had discovered that a subject I did not take could be understood if I gave it proper attention, and that should have been a liberating thing. Instead, because of the way it arrived, the discovery was wrapped in Mr Saunders’ office, the fate of four footballers, and the smell of institutional trouble. It is strange how often a useful realisation comes to you badly dressed, wearing the wrong shoes and arriving through a door you would not have chosen.

Still, the discovery remained once the fear began to settle. I had picked up economics almost from the outside, looked at the questions, and found the underlying order. I could read a prompt, identify what it was really asking, arrange a response, and make the argument behave. That was not a small thing, because it was another version of the mind doing what it had always done, not merely remembering material but detecting structure where other people saw subject matter.

In a different school, or perhaps in a different boy, that moment might have become a clean turn toward confidence. A teacher might have said that I seemed to understand this sort of material and perhaps should consider the subject, or a career adviser might have noticed that economics, accounting, business, interpretation and problem solving were not separate worlds but adjoining paddocks. Someone might have helped me see that this ease with systems, numbers and human behaviour could become a road rather than just a trick performed for someone else’s benefit. Perhaps someone did in their own way, but I do not remember it landing like that, and memory has a stubborn habit of keeping the emotional record even when the administrative record has been misplaced.

What I remember is the office, the questions, the papers, the seriousness, and the peculiar feeling that I had done something both clever and stupid at the same time. That combination would become familiar enough in later life to deserve its own filing cabinet, because I often found I could see something quickly, help someone with it, create a result, and still somehow end up sitting in the room where the consequences were being sorted. It was not always because the world was unfair, although it sometimes was. It was also because I had a habit of moving toward the problem before properly asking what the room would do with me once the problem was solved.

There is a type of intelligence that does not present itself as neat school success. It does not always wear the right uniform, follow the clean line from subject to result to prize, or wait patiently until someone in authority gives it permission to operate. Sometimes it wanders into the wrong corridor and accidentally proves something before anyone has asked for proof. Mine was often like that, because I could stumble into an area, look around, see the beams holding it up, and begin building without quite realising that other people had spent a term being shown where the hammer was kept.

That is not the same as saying nothing required effort, and I distrust that version of the story whenever it starts trying to make itself comfortable. Effort mattered, knowledge mattered, discipline mattered, and there were plenty of rooms where I was not immediately useful at all. There were subjects I did not know, skills I did not possess, and people whose quiet mastery deserved more respect than the impatient part of me sometimes gave it. But there was also this repeated experience of finding that a locked door was not always as locked as I had been told, provided I stopped standing outside it assuming it belonged to someone else.

That assumption is its own kind of prejudice, and it is one of the less obvious forms because it grows inside you while sounding like common sense. We usually talk about prejudice as something directed outward, which is fair enough because there is plenty of that to go around. Yet there is also the prejudice that tells you certain rooms are not yours, certain subjects are not yours, certain futures are not yours, and certain people are the sort who take economics while you remain whatever the room has decided you are. You begin accepting boundaries because they have been repeated often enough to sound like truth, and eventually you do some of the room’s work for it.

The economics essays disturbed that quiet internal arrangement. They did not make me triumphant, and they certainly did not place me on a grand path with sunlight, orchestral backing and a school counsellor nodding wisely in the background. They simply opened a small side gate, one I had not been seeking and one I would not have expected to find while helping four footballers with a plan of questionable academic purity. A subject I had not chosen had turned out to be accessible, and an ability I had not yet properly named had shown itself through someone else’s need.

There is something almost perfectly absurd about that, which is why the memory still has sharp edges but also makes me smile. I did not discover economics through inspiration, guidance, ambition or a carefully designed educational pathway. I discovered it because four boys who could play football better than they could write essays decided I might be useful, and one of them lacked the strategic brilliance required to copy my handwriting into his own. If there is a career guidance model in that, I doubt it will be adopted widely, though I have seen less practical systems survive in education for longer than they deserved.

Schools are full of official lessons, but the unofficial ones tend to last longer. The official lesson might have been about academic misconduct, personal responsibility, and the danger of assisting others beyond the bounds of propriety. The unofficial lesson was more complicated, because it taught me that intelligence could be both resented and consumed, both mocked and borrowed, both excluded and then quietly summoned when the mark or the outcome began to matter. It taught me that being useful could move me closer to people without making me one of them, and that rooms will sometimes reject what you are until they need what you can do.

It also taught me something I did not fully appreciate until much later, when work became another version of that office. People would arrive with questions they did not understand, risks they had not measured, numbers they had neglected, decisions they had avoided, and consequences already rolling downhill. They would ask me to turn chaos into something usable, but they would not always want the full explanation that went with it. They would often want the essay without the economics, the answer without the discomfort, and the result without the reflection that might have prevented the problem in the first place.

Accounting, when I finally fell back into it, was never simply about numbers, although that is often how the profession explains itself to make the work seem tidy. The numbers were where the evidence landed after people made choices, avoided choices, justified choices, forgot choices, or denied choices with the full sincerity only a human being can bring to a self-serving memory. Behind the figures were habits, evasions, ambitions, marriages, businesses, tax laws, bank managers, late nights, bad advice, misplaced confidence, and the occasional heroic attempt to make a spreadsheet tell a lie politely. To do the work properly, I had to read more than the figures, because I had to read the room, the client, the silence, the excuse and the little tremor in the voice when someone knew the truth before they had the courage to say it.

In that sense, the economics essays were not a detour from the later story. They were an early rehearsal, although I could not have known that while sitting in Mr Saunders’ office wondering how much trouble could attach itself to a boy who had not even sat the subject. I was given material from outside my declared territory, asked to make sense of it quickly, and expected to convert understanding into something someone else could use. I did it because I could, and because being able to do it gave me a sense of place, however temporary, before the room reminded me that usefulness and belonging are not the same thing.

That distinction would become one of the more expensive lessons of my life. Usefulness can look like belonging from a distance, especially when you are tired, lonely, eager to please, or too hungry for the warmth that comes when someone finally turns toward you. People come to you, rely on you, praise the result, and for a while it can feel like acceptance. But sometimes they are not holding out a hand at all, because sometimes they are simply passing you a problem, and once the problem is solved the hand disappears.

I was not wise enough then to know the difference, and perhaps it would be unfair to expect that of the boy in the chair. I only knew that I had been asked, and being asked felt better than being ignored. I only knew that the questions made sense, that I could answer them, and that a room which had not always known what to do with me had suddenly found an application for me. I mistook application for acceptance because I wanted to, and because wanting something badly enough can make even a poor imitation look convincing for a while.

There was another humiliation sitting underneath it too, quieter than the office and harder to name. To fit in, I had to reduce the full shape of myself into something that could be handed over. I had to become the essay, the explanation, the neat response to a problem, rather than the restless, awkward, angry, funny, wounded boy behind it. Dumbing it down was not only about simplifying thoughts so others could tolerate them; sometimes it was about shrinking the self until all that remained was the useful part.

That may sound a large meaning to place on a school incident, but childhood does not store things according to adult categories of importance. It stores them according to impact, embarrassment, hope, fear, and the strange temperature of rooms where you felt yourself being measured. A moment can be ridiculous and formative at the same time, which is inconvenient for anyone hoping to tell a clean story later. A boy can sit in a school office over a foolish essay scheme and still learn something about power, belonging, ability and the cost of being needed by people who do not quite see him.

I do not remember leaving Mr Saunders’ office with any great speech ringing in my ears. Life rarely arranges itself that neatly, and schools were not in the habit of providing narrative closure to boys who had wandered into trouble by being too helpful. I probably walked out relieved that I was not being expelled, ashamed that my help had become part of a scandal, and annoyed in that private way that comes when your cleverness has once again found a way to bruise you. I may also have felt a small, guilty pride, because the essays must have been good enough to cause trouble, and there are worse reviews than institutional alarm.

The hurt was real, but so was the evidence, and both had to sit together whether I liked it or not. I had been able to do the work, not the subject I had chosen, not the subject I had been taught, and not the subject for which I had sat dutifully in class absorbing the sanctioned sequence. I had looked at it, understood it, and produced something capable of passing for examination work. There was no medal in that, and given the circumstances it would have made a bold assembly item, but it told me something all the same.

Nothing is truly beyond me if I put my mind to it, though that is a dangerous sentence if handled badly. It can become arrogance in a borrowed coat, and I have no interest in dressing it up as proof that effort is optional or that other people’s expertise is merely decoration. I mean something more modest, and perhaps more useful, which is that many of the walls I accepted as permanent were not walls at all. Some were fences, some were habits, some were other people’s assumptions, and some were my own assumptions pretending to be facts.

The trick, of course, is that seeing a possible avenue does not make walking it simple. A path can open and still frighten you, because stepping onto it means admitting that the old map may have been wrong. It means challenging not only the room’s prejudice but your own, and that is often the prejudice most capable of disguising itself as prudence. It means asking why you thought certain work belonged to others, why you thought your mind had to stay within the subjects already assigned to it, and why you were so quick to lend your ability to someone else’s future before considering whether it might belong in your own.

I did eventually fall back on that kind of work, although I would not have described it that way at the time. I found myself in accounting, business, tax, interpretation, systems, and the endless human theatre behind the numbers. I found that people will always need someone to turn confusion into order, even if they sometimes resent the order once it points at them. I found that economics was not just a school subject I accidentally invaded, because it was part of the wider pattern of how people behave when pressure, money, pride and consequence start sharing a room.

The office with Mr Saunders became one of those small rooms I carried with me. I can still see the papers, still feel the odd combination of fear and offence, and still sense the absurdity of being questioned over essays in a subject I did not take. I can still see the four footballers moving through the school with a confidence I wanted to borrow, and I can still see myself handing over work as if the transaction might buy me a place near them. It did not buy me that place, not really, but it bought me something else, even if I was too young and too sore to value it properly.

It gave me a glimpse of an avenue I had not been seeking, and it suggested that the mind I kept reducing for the room might have uses beyond survival. That is not a neat victory, and it certainly was not a clean one. It was messy, embarrassing, unfair, faintly comic and oddly instructive, which is to say it was probably a fairly accurate preparation for the rest of my working life. The lesson did not arrive as encouragement, but as a bruise with information inside it, and I have had enough of those over the years to know they can still be useful once the swelling goes down.

So I do not look back on the economics essays simply as cheating, or helping, or being used, though there was a portion of each in the mix. I look back on them as one of the moments where the wall appeared in a different form, dressed this time in trial HSC questions, school authority, football status, and the handwriting of a boy too eager to be useful. I had been bouncing my head against that wall for years, trying to work out how much of myself the room could bear, and the impact hurt in the usual way. But somewhere in that impact, a small door opened, and once you discover a room is not beyond you, it becomes difficult to keep believing all the signs telling you to stay out.