Trout's speculative fiction "Walled In" and then Prometheus

Public education was my time of bondage, and I became, in a somewhat rigid framework, a kind of non-conformist, for a time.  Meanwhile, the smartest person I knew was thrilled to be given a free high school education in the public system.  Not only did that person go at the work with rigor and enthusiasm, but he also brought that same rigor to his own time at home, doing independent study.
Midnights with Tolkien, compared to my pre-dawn Stephen King stuff, reading about bumps in the night and character anxieties: my 40 years in the desert was independent study, from trying to guess the time by the position of the sun in the midday sky, to learning album names of classic rock groups I heard on the radio.
A lifestyle philosopher and journeyman stoic, in contrast to a real scientific mind.  Fruit roll ups stood in stark contrast to pipe tobacco.
“Have a look at this.”
“Nah, I’m busy idly musing on life and circumstance.”
“But it’ll get you off.  Have this.”
And it was, the water from the Samaritan well, that which, having partaken, were supernaturally sated by the experience, a kind of pleasant thing of something jiggering in the neuro pathways, re-ordering the substance of the mind.
Where they put his name in an honorary spot on the lobby wall, the supervisors would look for me to make sure I hadn’t just walked out the door without permission, let an escaping fart from the underpants of the public school system, a man too stupid and intellectually restless to avoid stumbling in front of his own thoughts.
It bemused me that some of penal institution design was being utilized in the public schools, something of mental march through the desert, a boot camp badge of honor before we took our places along the line in adulthood.  Me stealing the school’s ancient and worn edition of Kilgore Trout’s non-fiction Walled In.
No better opportunity to take a minute and absorb a scrap of knowledge, filling the mind was something that increasing our ability to think, something that teaches, and makes the life so much more efficient, if not outright easier.
I looked at Anthony Burgess in paperback, that work said to be not much open to discussion among the faculty, as it looked at the institutionalized manipulation of a reprobate mind.  Conflict theory so far from their thoughts, as of some sources today, and a social standard holding unofficially among them, a social standard lost now as the thoroughfare by and large seems to be a confluence of random thoughts and anxieties.
Productivity, generativity, versus idle-navel gazing and stray thoughts that pour from the spigot of the mind like sleet and hail.