It’s hard to picture Keith Richards taking driver’s ed

When I was in the ninth grade, I learned how to dissect a frog.

As a senior in high school, I endured six weeks of square dancing, which somehow found its way into the gym class curriculum.

And way back there in elementary school, I memorized the Gettysburg address.

Now, as a firm believer in education, I can’t deny those apparently frivolous expeditions into molding young minds bore little relationship to real life, but then again, I never considered schooling to be tooling me for my future.

I’m with Bruce Springsteen on this.

“We learned more from a three-minute record,” he sings in “No Surrender,” an anthem to rebellion, “than we ever did in school.”

Still and all, though, it’s always interesting to me when something arcane bubbles to the surface, leaving me smiling and thinking to myself, “It was a good thing I was paying attention that day.”

I kind of wish I’d taken a home economics class or two.

Then maybe I’d be better in the kitchen, though I have to say through trial and lots of error my Johnny Marzetti recipe might be better than the original.

The secret ingredient is, by the way, always playing good music during the prep stage, something lively and empathetic, spiced with just enough humor to make the whole thing fun.

Last week, for example, as I marinated my fresh mushrooms and browned my ground beef, I was happily dancing around to “Ooh-La-La,” which remains one of the greatest Faces’ songs ever made.

Its key line is one of those hidden gems that can stun you:

“I wish that I knew

what I know now

when I was younger.”

There is so much wisdom in those 13 words, so much wistful regret, that I always have to stop myself and remember those guys were in their early 20s when they recorded that tune.

Now was it to the level of just an average Lennon-McCartney composition?

Please.

No one before or since has ever done it better.

To cite one example: Less than a week before their first feature film was due for its final edit, some movie studio execs realized there was no title track.

Overnight John and Paul wrote “A Hard Day’s Night.”

I mean, can you imagine that? They were barely out of their teens.

You can’t teach that kind of preposterous talent.

All you can do is sit back and admire it, knowing full well what you’re witnessing will never — could never — happen again.

It took the Beatles 11 hours to record their first album. In a few years they’d take six months getting “Sgt. Pepper” to the point they believed they’d gotten it right.

All you can do is shake it up, baby. Twist … and … shout.

Most rock stars had little love for formal schooling.

Oh there have been exceptions: Tom Scholz, the brainiac behind Boston, had some kind of advanced engineering degree, and Steely Dan’s laconic co-founders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, met while studying at Bard College.

But most of them got out while the getting was good, eager to experience life on its (and their) own terms.

It’s hard to picture Keith Richards taking driver’s ed.

I never took it either.

Oh I was supposed to, but then a classmate of mine — stud athlete, good student, nice guy — broke his leg in a car crash, and that hit me hard, so I backed out of that class.

I was 15 years old and already knew how dangerous the real world could be, how everything could change in the sad flash of time it took to punch in a new station on the car radio.

So I put it off.

Mom was relieved.

“There’s no hurry, Michael,” she said over dinner one night. “More Johnny Marzetti?”

In the summer of 1971, though, I felt stronger and better equipped to get the show on the road.

I took private lessons from a guy who drove a Dodge Demon, candy-apple red with air-conditioning, an AM-FM radio and about as much leg room as a bumper car.

But I learned fast, and even though I failed my first test — who knew that a flashing yellow light didn’t mean proceed with caution? — I was fully vested by the Fourth of July.

And those seat-of-the-pants lessons, imparted as the Rolling Stones sang about tasting some “Brown Sugar” and Three Dog Night brought the phrase “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” into common parlance, must have stayed with me longer than I thought.

When was the last time you had to parallel park?

I was in South Florida over the holidays, visiting my brother, who was riding shotgun as we tooled around Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, a ritzy enclave hard by the Atlantic. The streets were narrow, the traffic heavy and tourist-pedestrians roamed aimlessly in packs.

He spotted a space, and I drew on my driver’s ed memories, stopping and backing, cocking the steering wheel this way and that, and before I knew it, I’d snuggled my wife’s Honda CRV into it.

He does this all the time, but his car’s about the size of a toaster.

I felt pretty good, but my wife was amazed.

“I never could have done that,” she whispered in my ear as we unloaded our beach chairs and my cooler. “All that traffic.”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this crazy world, it’s this:

You might never have to allemande left or recite Abraham Lincoln’s 272 words spoken on a Pennsylvania battlefield, and the chances that you’ll ever have to scalpel-scrape an amphibian’s skull might be minimal, but it never hurts to pay attention.

Life, to quote Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” is for learning.