There is no Back to School season on The Walking Dead

Back to school season is upon us and as kids all over return to the classrooms, one glaring problem jumps out in the world of The Walking Dead.

When you’re busy fighting zombies in the zombie apocalypse, you really don’t need to worry about trivial things like the quadratic formula. (Raise your hand if you have every used the quadratic formula outside of math class. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?) I talked in an earlier article about the need for characters in The Walking Dead to start developing new technologies, using the comparison of the prolific Professor on Gilligan’s Island who could manufacture just about anything with coconuts. But what will happen in future generations if no one is learning how to do things?

We all know that The Walking Dead is just a television show and an incredibly popular and long-running series of comic books. But when you stop and consider the world that is developing around the characters that we know and love, things start to jump out.

Remember when Dale taught Glenn about fixing cars? That’s a useful thing to know – that is, until gas runs out. This is why someone needs to develop a new form of fuel. But who can do that?

Carol ran her own version of nursery school at the prison, but instead of purple dinosaurs it was pin-the-pokey-stick-in-the-Walker’s-eye-and-kill-it. Again, useful lessons indeed. Granted, the only one of those kids who survived was Carl, but the fact remains that children are the future and they aren’t being taught well so that they can lead the way. Frankly, there isn’t much beauty to be possessed in the zombie apocalypse. (Sorry, Whitney Houston)

Joking aside, let’s think about education for a moment. We’ve seen kids at the Hilltop and at the Kingdom. How will those kids learn trades that can help in rebuilding society if no one is around to teach them?

See what I’m getting at?

Learning, from this point forward, will consist of apprenticeships where people who do the job must teach younger people so that they can take over in the future. Doctors will have to impart knowledge from memory because there are no more medical schools. The only way for new technology to develop is for intellectually curious kids to follow people like Eugene around and ask questions. Eventually, knowledge will be imparted. Or so we’d hope.

School in the world of The Walking Dead is focused first and foremost on survival, and after that it’s learning things that will help you to survive. After that, you pick up whatever you can because you never know when some random piece of knowledge might come in handy.

For now, though, school children don’t have to worry about zombies, so they’re going to learn about algebra and calculus because…well, I’m in my 30s and I still don’t know why I learned algebra and calculus, but that’s part of growing up.

More from Undead Walking

The Walking Dead returns October 22 on AMC.

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