There’s a chart doing the rounds on social networks, ranking thinkers by how punk they are. Hobbes and Heidegger, it states, are “basically a police officer”; while for Dionysius the Renegade, Marx and Parmenides, it declares: “They’re not punk, punk is them.” I have no other way of understanding how real this is, or whether Žižek belongs so near to Engels, for instance. To memorise this list would be beyond worthless, like retaining the instructions for a plane you have neither licence for nor any sensible prospect of flying. Yet, here I am, attempting to memorise it; because it’s A-level season, and there is no state more howlingly impotent than attempting to be encouraging to people who are marching headlong into a knowledge inferno.If someone had actually told you when they were small that, one day, you ‘d wave them cheerfully off as they went to scale an ice wall, and you had no idea what the conditions would be like, nor any hint whether that was the right sort of choice, and only the dimmest sense of their ability level, you ‘d say: “No, I will find a better way. I will scale the ice wall myself, and if I die, so be it. “And yet, here we are; there isn’t a strategy B.GCSEs were a various sort of abuse, since all the product was dimly familiar, like a repeating stress and anxiety dream from childhood, in which you understood the part of a plant but might just explain them in mime. Now they’re in territory so unusual that even the essentials– holding a flashcard, reading out a keyword, awaiting a response– fill me with complicated horror, locked out of the cathedral of knowledge and shelterless. Who the hell does comprehend chemistry, anyway? How can he comprehend it? It can’t be more than six months ago that he could not utilize a spoon.The school sends out useful e-mails about supporting your young person, and I only ever used to skim them, since how they could perhaps approach the uniqueness of my cluelessness? However actually, checking out between the lines, all the recommendations boils down to:”Your task is: try to be normal.” I’m currently discovering this more difficult than additional maths. However what do I understand? I have no concept what occurs in more mathematics. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist