They are going to kill us

They are going to kill us. Our kids are going to kill us. Not just because they wake us up, mid-hangover at 5.30 on Saturday morning or keep us up all night with their well aimed groin kicks while "co-sleeping" (a form of sleep deprivation torture that the UN is currently considering declaring to be a war crime). At the very least, it's a Trade Practices Act breach; "co" implies "together". Only one party is sleeping. The other two are trying to sleep, in between being maimed and wondering if they could just about manage to get a whole uninterrupted hour on the dining room table.

No, they are going to kill us when they find out the truth. Today's post is brought to you by the letter P and the number 17.

What do pop stars, porn stars and parents have in common (other than the letter P)? We are all good at presenting the most preposterous lies in a sincere and believable way. Tell me that this lyric makes any kind of sense:

We're the ones who flirt with disaster,
On your ass we'll pounce like a panther.
Cut the bullshit out with a dagger,
With a dagger, with a dagger.
Do or die we all gonna stay young,
Shoot the lights out like a machine gun.
Think it's time for a revolution,
Revolution, revolution.

It's drivel but, put it into the mouth of a pop star and an auto-tune machine and you've sold a million copies to teenagers who are fooled into thinking that it's something deep and meaningful.

Porn stars are the same. No one has sex like that. No one. Or at least not for that long. Or that big. Or that loud - the neighbours would complain - right after the kids woke up and wandered into your room to find out what all the fuss was about.

And parents - what's our particular brand of poppycock? Enter the number 17 and our new word "Preparation"

Chatting to my 3 year old's childcare teachers the other day, they were telling me about the importance attached to preparing the students for school in their curriculum. Teach them the alphabet, how to write their own names, how to count to an arbitrarily high number. All this, presumably, so that they can sit, bored rigid in their kindergarten class (or start down the path to long term, boredom-induced behaviour problems) because they already know everything that they were going to learn anyway.

Kindergarten is, in turn, a preparation for year 1 where you will really need to know which way round a 'b' goes, what the number 13 is for and how to get to the toilet before the catastrophe strikes.

And so on up the line until primary (elementary school - for my North American readers) is over. In total, primary school is supposed to prepare you for high school.

And you arrive in high school, well prepared to actually get on with living your life - you've got skills.

No. What you're there for is to be prepared for a working life or, given the state of the employment market for people that have had only a mere 13 years of formal education, for tertiary education of some kind. Don't worry about finding your passion or exploring the world around you, just do the exams to prepare you for the next step - ideally a step up into a very nice university whose role it will be to ...

That's right, prepare you for the working world.

Seventeen years from start to finish. Seventeen years of exams, assignments, dull drudgery and uninspiring education (unless a particularly motivated teacher can slip some into the classroom in a brown paper bag and hand it out, like the drug dealer in the B-block boys toilets, when the curriculum authorities aren't looking). Seventeen of the best years of your life devoted to being prepared.

When they find out what we've prepared them for, they are going to kill us.

Welcome to the working world. It's dull. It's uninspiring. Your skills are not going to be even recognised let alone used. And you'll be doing the same thing all day, every day, 48 weeks a year until you can't work any more.

If I was them, I'd kill us too!