Then in his second semester at Eastern District High School, he gave up working in school altogether. "I don't really know why, and I don't want to rational ize about it, but it may have been that I had been systematically de-educated. With all the emphasis on discipline, all the fire gets damped down. I knew I had a given role in society, and you wonder what do you need to know about Plato to fix the engine of an automobile. Anyhow, I flew apart, I began cutting classes, gambling in the bathroom, the whole bit... I picked pockets. I was a little crook.