more thoughts re: yesterday afternoon's post

[lauralh]

So let's move forward to the premise that college is bad, because it encourages a culture of excess. Either you meet and fuck a shitton of people, or you drink too much, or drop too much acid, or just overdose on drama. And if you ain't doing any of that, you're probably working way too fucking hard on classes. There are very few careers where you have to pull all-nighters, ever.

But then again, it probably goes back to high school. The reason people explode in college is because their whole life up to that point, they've had to fucking ask permission to go to the fucking bathroom. Freedom is fun! and scary.

Something needs to be done. But not for me, I'm over it, I work for a living.

Comments

[ex-motel666812.livejournal.com]

I think the main problem is that when the government offers "education," you have to realize that what they're really offering is pro-state propaganda. Public schools teach kids to sit down and shut up, and not to question "authority," and to marinate in their own medicority, just like the government flunkies who are "teaching" them.

I would never send my kids to the government for "education." I don't like the job our government is doing on anything else, so why should their "education" be any different? I'm astonished by parents who blithely send their kids off to public schools and then wonder why their kids become stupid, angry, and classist. Um, maybe because they're being taught by the government?

People are idiots.

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[gfrancie.livejournal.com]

People aren't always idiots, some are just too trusting of the environment and there are people who are doing their best to educate kids and help them out. There is just too many who are apathetic.

[ex-motel666812.livejournal.com]

I think we may be having two different conversations. :)

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[gfrancie.livejournal.com]

*laughs*
Well I say this because I agree with some points of your opinion that the general dogma of state run schools is to encourage the existence of calm accepting masses. After all the original ideology of the public school system in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century was to create factory workers. They taught people to respect authority, to do boring tasks over and over without question and to fear a bad report. That has been shifted from the factory job to the office job or service job.
People go with it because it seems easy if you just accept it.
But there are still people who do genuinely try and actually teach kids things and how to be independent beings and think for themselves. They are few and far between.
I had an incredible teacher when I was 13. I say she was incredible because she even interested kids who normally weren't keen on what was being tossed at them. She encouraged a lot of conversation and spirit in people. I remember distinctly this one project we did (it was US history we were taking) where we spent several weeks playing as if we were colonists in early America and we started off fairly peaceful but then we got caught up in taking as much land as possible and killing Indians and what not and when everything failed in the end and people were dying in this role-playing game she kind of took us out of it and said, "look at what you are doing." We learned how easy it was to get caught up in the blind game of capitalism and colonial warring. Fascinating stuff.
It is a rare situation.

[ex-motel666812.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree with you that situations like that are rare. I've been blessed by the presence of a few--a VERY few--good teachers in my life.

Being a good teacher in a public school is a revolutionary act. Bless them for their forebearance, and for actually teaching their students to analyze and think. I wonder what this world would be like if ALL teachers actually, well, TAUGHT?

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[gfrancie.livejournal.com]

I think that teachers should be forced to take a break every five years and do something else. A sabbatical if you will. Not just hang out and do nothing but do something entirely different. Go work in a restaurant or maybe travel. Just something that takes them away and teaches them something new. It might broaden their experience and maybe foster a sense of empathy.

I do have a lot of sympathy for many teachers because they are often held to various requirements and many don't want to do it. My Mom sorta sees this one teacher (that is a complicated situation) and he talks about how much shit he has to put up with from the school board, a community, state requirements and then the general politics from various teachers. He is a real bad-ass and works really hard to keep a lot of that away from the classroom. But at the same time it leaves him really exhausted.

[ex-motel666812.livejournal.com]

Yeah...plus, so many of the kids are poorly-socialized, because their parents just don't give a shit. It's all well and good for me to wish that teachers cared more, but the sad fact is, most kids don't deserve any kindness. They're animals--racist, classist, sexist, and stupid from being raised by TV since birth. Even if a teacher went the extra mile, it wouldn't matter to most of their students.

Oh, it's all just so depressing. :)

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[gfrancie.livejournal.com]

It is depressing. The part that depressed me the most were the kids who were six and everyone was giving up on them. The parents didn't seem to understand what was going on, the teachers were essentially placing the kid in one place and saying, "you are going to be a failure for the rest of your life" and everyone just went with it.

It made me leave.
My cousin was a teacher for a number of years and she left eventually. She said, "I left because I didn't want to hate kids or other people. It got to be too much."

[ex-motel666812.livejournal.com]

This is so, so sad. I wish there were more solutions, besides individual parents making the decision to home-school. We need systemic change, and we need it NOW.

My inclination is to encourage people who don't have the resources to home-school, not to breed. But of course, those are the very ones who ARE breeding. Thus, more thrown-away 6 tear-olds.

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