Education in the USA is a royal and long-running shit-storm, and everybody’s to blame.
I was fortunate in my background presenting me with so many different sides to it. I began public schooling in the early 1980s, where across my elementary years I was propelled into the Future Problem-Solving program. My parents moving us wherever they could find jobs, I averaged 2 or 3 schools every year. This necessitated me being a quick judge of character, only able to know others for limited pockets of time, although the schools themselves maintained their distinctions and commonalities rather bluntly. In middle school my grades pushed me into taking more and more advanced courses, beginning 6th and 7th grades in public but finishing each of those two terms by home-schooling until kids my own age caught up with me. Though I was compelled to take the ACT when I was barely 13, my scores evidently ranked better than 97% nationwide for all ACT testing that particular year. In 8th grade, I was forced into simultaneously attending three different schools, no one meeting all the many requirements pushed onto me by counselors doubling as my chauffeurs. In spite of the impossibly ridiculous schedule I never actually had to do homework at home, rather finding the time to somehow finish the work while still in class. Often skipping lunches to do so. But in my freshman year of high school most of my classes were actually at the junior level, aside from electives which were with the other freshmen, and English, which I took at the honors senior level. And, I dropped out before the year was through, confounding every adult around me. At that rate I would have graduated at 15.
I understood that classrooms could no longer teach me the experiences which I honestly required. I have remained dead serious about self-educating myself incessantly, to the day I die. This granted me the sort of life where, despite reading the entire works of Shakespeare before I had finished puberty, I have been turned down for jobs over possessing no better paperwork than the GED equivalency. I earned that at 17, while living and working at the oldest Job Corps center in the country, garnering what at the time was the highest test score in that center’s colorless history. Then I took my degree in Building & Maintenance from there and set my blue collar to work cleaning and repairing the damages and mistakes of all the people I would encounter for the duration of my working years and probably the rest of my life. The comic book hoodoo was how I let off steam, with no resources left to me by employers who without exception find themselves empowered by proper society to relentlessly pay late and/or pay less than agreed or who’d just snake their way out of payments altogether. When a job would reach the inevitable point of no longer providing me with either mental exercise or physical exercise, I held no qualms with moving on, because actively learning from these experiences was always the one and only thing which I was after. Long before I had the language for it, I never took survival as important enough to validate lying, cheating or stealing, not for myself and not from anybody else.
Back when I was 18, an uncle of mine who was a collegiate professor of philosophy brought me up to ivy league land, in a bold attempt at living out Good Will Hunting prior to that film existing. I was notorious on their keg scene, showing up in my slave uniforms ready to debate anybody and ready to out-drink anybody, sometimes to the extent of burning money to emphasize a point. I recall a Halloween party where roughly 50 young adults, each of them likely with more in the bank than I’d see over the next decade, all flipped the fuck out over an over-flowing toilet. I remember having to physically wrestle a landline phone away from one of the hosts who was trying to call 911, before fixing the problem myself. Thus giving those present an entirely new and debilitating cause to drink for the rest of that evening.
This was more than 20 years ago, but I remember the frustration of my uncle telling me how higher learning in this country was devolving into specialty job training, how his own field of philosophy had been openly regarded as the dead science going back probably all the way to Thomas Merton. Nothing new had been brought to the proverbial table, and in fact anything bearing the faintest hint of revolutionary was outright shunned by the community at large. Many long years of obsessively following the news later, I saw how the same could easily be said for the world of physics going all the way back to Albert Einstein, with the most cutting edge revelations today serving no better purpose than reevaluating ideas from ago. Socially and publicly, education is now a thing shunned by the masses; schools dropping the titles of valedictorians because they are currently observed as special privileges, when the lacking of shame directed at the most ignorant is precisely what granted this country the 45th Presidential administration and its invariably long-lasting chilling effects. Nobody has to be the product of their environment, I am living proof to that testament, but I have never traded words with anybody younger than myself, online or off, from among the entertained masses who might possibly exist for any given moment without everything in life spelled out for them in over-sized, glittery lettering. When Craigslist was a thing, I found endless freelance gigs where I ghostwrote term papers for blockheads across the country who I presume continue to fail without my ingenuity.
My uncle lacked the foresight to see just how far the apples would fall from the trees, however, in regards to the safe space pathology of recent years where universities are made to shun any prospects of challenging their student bodies lest anyone be offended by something they did not already know. The damages Michelle Obama orchestrated by privatizing school lunches in order to benefit the lowest common denominator was a wretched affair, as for-profit interests deserve no more space in the sphere of public education than does organized religion, sensibly none whatsoever, yet corporations are welcomed more than teachers unions by overpaid school-board aldermen in every state. Privatization was an effort grossly maximized by outgoing Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who has taken her lifelong hard-on for private education and applied its bias across the board, so that along the lines of Montessori schooling, students are not taught what they may need to know about life in this world, but only what they would like to know. Or simply that which is easiest to pass on. But as I’ve pointed out in the past, ideologically gated communities are every bit as confining as their physical counterparts, existing exclusively to block the mass of reality for the sake of appeasing personal comfort zones. This will never change in a culture where ego is openly and wrongly acknowledged as a thing that carries any weight unto itself.
In the same vein as with healthcare, costs of education are the only issue even remotely addressed by elected officials, when in reality, contrary to the tenets of capitalism money is not everything and there are problems abound which money cannot even begin to fix. Free education for all citizens up to and including Bachelor’s degrees should and could be feasible, but taking the concept of profit from the margins altogether would allow all Americans a democratic chance overnight. Coaches and deans earning more than actual teachers has got to stop, and schools funding themselves through athletics programs has got to stop. No part of education should be factored by lucrative profitability or limited by a lack of finance and capital. If arrogant students do not care to learn about something they find objectionable, they should free their seats for those more prepared for how nothing to do with this world exists to cater. Definitely, nobody deserves to have a building or street named for them, and nobody warrants a statue, but if they hold historical significance for good or ill, education must encompass their story.
Why can it not be a common thing for students to take 2 or 3 years off prior to college, getting a taste themselves for what the real, adult world has to offer in the way of work schedules and life or death bills? Would dropout rates not plummet if they had cause to take their studies seriously? Or soldiers to have not merely tuition support, but their indentured servitude to not even begin until after the degree is earned, presenting soldiers with that much more life experience, that much more knowledge about what they fight for and what they fight against? If they had been able to achieve an education, would they be stupid enough to enlist to begin with? None of this is status quo, because this nation and its government cannot function without the diverse citizenry being used and abused, explicitly in service to the loudest egos among us, and not the betterment of any collective livelihood. How do idiots rise to power? Because their degrees are paid for, not earned, in this magical era where neither wealth or power is accumulated through egoless intentions. Made all the less problematic when the masses themselves insist on believing that their very own egotistical demands for ongoing satiation amounts to any identifiable measure of independence.
I am so unintelligent, that I have never been in debt in my life, even if I have nothing to show for it. And having nothing to show for it, means none are encouraged to take credit for what I have done and none are encouraged to take blame for what I have done. If you want a job done right, you don’t go looking to get spoon-fed any notion of actions being free from consequences. The codependency upon fictions, on fantasies, is how the susceptibility for believing falsehoods is instilled.