Why Exams Are an Administrative Conspiracy to Keep Students from Rampant Knitting

The year is 2007. The air is moderately cool with a 50% humidity level. There is bit of a cold front on its way, but he doesn’t care, he just got a new parka from his grandparents as a preemptive graduation gift. But this isn’t enough to put a smile on his face today. No. He has just been left out of his friends’ celebratory knitting session. They never even told him why. Of course, they hadn’t invited him in the first place. At his return to his dorm from his final class of “Why Refrigerators don’t Deserve Rights” at Columbia University, he was only dismayed to find a knitting session amongst his friends in his dorm. They immediately stopped and scurried out of the dorm with their yarn, covering up their knitted items for fear that our tragic hero may react adversely to seeing the evidence of his favorite pastime. Something ruptured in him that day. After being excluded by his friends, he sought to preclude any sort of celebration that preceded the end of the scholastic year, for if he suffered from the absence of knitting, then everyone would.

Ask yourself: when is the last time you saw someone knitting at school? Exactly. Why? Exams, a perverted determination of whether the students had learned anything. As if that was the point of school. Knowledge isn’t going to get us anywhere. Look where we are now. Hunger is pervasive. Climate change’s shadow threatens the sustainability of the human race. Governments are increasingly corrupt. And worst of all, Grandmas don’t know how to spend time with their children because none of them know how to knit anymore.

Think of a world where unbridled knitting was not suppressed. Our problems would be nameless. World hunger would cower as, with some yarn and crochet hooks, everyone will forget they were ever hungry. Bingo. Climate change: knit a big sweater around the Earth to keep the heat of the sun’s radiation from entering the atmosphere. Bango. Corruption: give everyone some knitted socks so they have everything they ever wanted. Bongo. You can think, and experiment, and do all that scientific method baloney all day, every day and not get anywhere. Just look where we are now and all the problems that have arose from their being a scarcity of knitting. We are exalting the fact that unemployment is at its lowest its ever been, but the real problem is overemployment. There is just too many damn people not knitting and ensuring the function of everyday society. 

The whims of a single man have crumbled society. I hear a lot these days in the halls that it feels like something is missing. You can see it in their eyes too. You can’t help but feel like everyone puts on a smile, but that the soul is really just moping around like it had a bad burrito for lunch. It is only just that the oppression of this naive tyranny be brought to a grinding halt such that everyone everywhere may have all that they have ever wanted and all that the world has ever needed: laser tag. (But let’s wait to rebel. My AP Lit grade is teetering on the edge of a B and I need a good grade on the exam).