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Serious Education in America



This is a great passage from an essay somebody turned me onto earlier: “Learning to be stupid in the culture of cash.” It’s written by a college professor shocked at the lack of knowledge her students have:

Let me put it succinctly: I don’t think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-echelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work–basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.

I also just posted this in comments elsewhere, but my girlfriend is currently getting her Master’s in teaching. When polled as to why they want to be teachers, the other people in her class replied overwhelmingly:

“So we can have the summers off!”







5 Reader Responses

  1. Haeresis Says:
    July 18th, 2005 at 8:52 pm

    LOL Most teachers I’ve know have spent their summers working second jobs

  2. alistair Says:
    July 18th, 2005 at 9:16 pm

    most teachers i know either are embarassed at the amount of time off they have or they defend thier position as professional, highly educated educators and fuck the dog all summer while we have to undo the programming they have exposed our children to all school year. in canada teachers are union members and are therefore indoctrinated in social politics so everything they teach goes through that filter before they even open thier mouths.
    thier job is to spew out low income job robots for the most part, the low percentage of grade school grads that go to university fall into the catagory described above. the small percentage of all of the grade school grads that have higher than average accumen are invisible and appear as if by magic in law, politics and upper management. they are not so much products of education as survivers.

  3. james Says:
    July 18th, 2005 at 9:37 pm

    I had a great public education. I was enrolled in a Magnet program in second grade, and every school I went to after that was some sort of Magnet program. Our high school was a Humanities Magnet, and a lot of it was college prep– I didn’t go onto a four-year but everyone else that I knew said that the first two years were a repeat of our high school curriculum.

    What struck me as odd, amongst my peers, was the dedication to “regurgitating” the material, as opposed to learning and applying it to our respective lives. These kids were being groomed by their parents for serious jobs and careers, and yet they only viewed tests and quizzes as assortments of facts to be spit out whenever prompted.

    I passed the CORE curriculum (as it was called) because I was genuinely interested in learning about philosophy, art history, and social institutions. I also dug it because, as an aspiring writer, I was allowed to run amok with essays, which was the majority basis for our overall grading. Thus, I ended up at odds with my peers because I refused to “regurgitate” the material. I would only write about what I knew, or what I could at least demonstrate some knowledge of, while classmates were writing their essays from a need to pass and maintain their GPA.

    For a while, I got off on the notion that I didn’t have to study or read the materials because I could “write my way” through it, but eventually my curiosity caused me to engage in the curriculum more than I normally would. I felt no need to do homework as long as I was acing my essays, but towards the end I even found myself interested in the homework.

    I consider myself educated and ambitious, but on my own terms. My experience, though, has taught me that the reason why people don’t want to embrace education is because they see no practical need for it. Unless it gets them somewhere, people really don’t want to bother with learning.

    In short, even the straight A students are looking for a shortcut, if they believe they can attain it. But rather than embrace stupidity, they transcend it and end up being elitists.

  4. Inder Says:
    July 18th, 2005 at 11:20 pm

    Reminds me of that Peter Tosh song “You can’t blame the youth”. If you can control the mind of a child, you can control a hell of a lot

  5. alistair Says:
    July 18th, 2005 at 11:49 pm

    that`s what the jesuits say.



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