I will start by admitting that I am a bit riled up while writing this. Anger isn't the right word, indignant is a bit closer. Regardless, I just got off the phone with the provider for my student debt who told me that I owe them $32,000. Now, to back up a little, that wasn't the total cost of my degree. My parents thankfully paid a large portion of the cost while I was in school. So the cost of my (and here's the part where I have to laugh) philosophy degree was at least $40,000. Good god why? Well, I changed majors probably 5 times and, upon realizing that nothing really grabbed me, latched onto philosophy in hopes that I could go to law school and get a 'real job'. It was only during my senior year that I realized that not only was it too late to switch again, but that I hated school and law school would only provide me more debt and more schooling. Needless to say, I scraped by with as much sanity as I could and am left with complicated feelings towards education. In this post we'll take a walk that will be cathartic for me, but will hopefully give you some insight into the fucked up state (in my humble opinion) of the educational system.
I will begin by making an assertion that I know holds for myself and most of my friends. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of my generation feels the same. We went to college because we felt like we had to and we didn't know what else to do. I didn't go to school because I wanted to, I went to school because after being "schooled" for 18 years of my life, that was one of the only things I knew how to do. Now, I want to emphasize that I was schooled, not learning. There's a difference between the two. Learning is an active process where the learner is engaged in seeking out new information for a purpose (because the learner is interested or needs the knowledge for a specific purpose, for example). Being schooled is a passive process. In this case, the recipient of the knowledge is told what information to learn, how to learn it and when to learn it. The modern education system is a system of schooling. The purpose of which is for students to learn to be unquestioning, passive recipients of information. Re-read that sentence, it's important.
Now that may seem like a strange thing to say, but it will make more sense once I break things down a bit. First look at the content taught to students. 99% of it is bullshit. Remember all those times we said "I will never need to know this information"? We were right! We should have listened to ourselves. When was the last time you used geometry, or someone asked you about the purpose of the mitochondria, or you had to know when to use semicolon? Now I'm not saying that there aren't professions where that is useful knowledge. But when less than 5% of your students will use the Pythagorean Theorem in their lifetime, teaching it to everyone is a huge waste of time and energy. Think about all of the history and science and math that we learned that we have never used. Literally years of our lives was spent being fed information that we will never need to know. So why do we do it? Because the purpose of the educational system is not to create well-informed, reasoning, thinking individuals. That is the last thing that the shadow powers (the higher echelon of rich, powerful people) want. Intelligent, free-thinking people are difficult to control and unpredictable. So, it is much better to have the masses be passive, receptive, and unquestioning. And that is exactly how our educational system raises children to be.
Think about the method of delivery of information in the schools. I can only speak for my personal experience, but I have read enough horror stories from other school systems to know that I wasn't alone. We are not encouraged to question what we are taught. In fact, we are actively discouraged to think for ourselves. Not only was I never allowed to choose my curriculum, I remember being sharply reprimanded for questioning too deeply into what the teacher was asking. How backwards is that? This is supposedly a learning environment, but there is no opportunity to actually seek out what is personally interesting or to even ask the hard questions within a topic. Was I ever actually interested in calculus or biological classification or 19th century poetry? Who the hell knows! I never even stopped to ask myself because it never mattered. Not only was it compulsory that I go to school, I had no say in what I learned. And what kind of mindset does that environment cultivate? One where people never even think about what they want to learn, what they're interested in. It's no wonder that we spend years trying to figure out what we want to do, we spent our childhoods being fed information without ever inquiring into ourselves.
So, back to my story. I graduate high school with my only 'real world' experience being minimum wage jobs (hell on Earth). Needless to say I was scared shitless. I had been told my whole life that I had to go to college or I'd be flipping patties (or go back to working at Sears). Furthermore, my head was stuffed with all that abstract knowledge and when I tried to think about what I might do instead, I had no idea! I didn't even know other possibilities existed. Honestly, I think that's part of it too. I feel like I was never told that there are people who travel the world and teach yoga and build trails in Colorado (what my brother is currently doing) as a living. Unfortunately, all I knew was that I didn't want to end up like my manager at Sears - miserable and in a dead-end job in my 50s. I had this idea of higher education that has been put on a pedestal - it would be my savior.
So I went to college. And for awhile it was wonderful. I was free and I had choice and I was surrounded by people searching for something more. Wanting to be more, just like me. I was so naive. What I stepped into was another belt on the production line, an extension of the public education system. And I went to a private college! Sure the school culture was probably different from public colleges, but I think the outcome was the same. And you know what the really fucked up thing is? How they switch it up on you. They started off so seductive. They told me how it was this wonderful life experience that I should be excited for. How I was going to have all of these wonderful friends and learn and do all of these wonderful things. And I'm not saying they lied to me. Not completely. I did meet wonderful people and I did have wonderful experiences.
But then I got to my final few years and everything shifted. Suddenly I'm getting pressured by the 'real world'. I'm getting messages from my adviser that I need to start thinking about jobs and I need to be thinking about a career and I better make sure I'm graduating on time and oh I have $30,000 of student debt. Holy shit talk about stress. I thought I was there for the experience! And suddenly all this shit starts crashing in and I'm panicking and so is everyone around me. Suddenly it's not fun and games anymore. We have to get serious about our lives and figure out what we're doing and he everything figured out - all while we're sleep-deprived and stressed and going to class and studying for exams. Binge drinking in education is not a problem because students just love their booze so much. They're trying to drink away all the fucking pressure that school drops on you. I know I did it. I was running from myself and the stress.
I went crazy during those last two years. My emotional stability really suffered and I destroyed a relationship I had with a girl I loved. I became very distant to my friends and drank heavily to numb the pain. It was a dark time for me and I think the reason I was so afraid and anxious was because I saw what was coming. I was being pushed headlong into the corporate grinder that is the American economic machine. I realized that for all the 'choice' I had, every track would spit me out at the same place. Whether I was a doctor, or a lawyer or English teacher, I was being form-fit to be another cog among millions. Oh sure I would be able to make a decent living. But what did that really mean? Joining the middle class to get force fed desires through the media and get shit on by the 1%? I didn't want that. But the best part is, by the time I was at the end of it and realized that I didn't want that I had so much debt that I had to participate in the machine to pay it off. See how wonderfully, sadistically brilliant it is?
My friends felt it too. That's why they all had fear and anxiety in their eyes when they talked about 'joining the real world'. That's why when I see their Facebook posts about struggling with bills and apartment neighbors, what I feel is that quiet "I can't believe I became a part of this". We want to live meaningful lives, but we were never encouraged to do so. We were taught a lot of things in school, but we were never taught to be good people. That wasn't even on the agenda. Why were we never taught morality? Why did we never learn to meditate? Why are there no classes about compassion, love.. spiritual matters? The shit that actually matters. And if we decide we want experience, then there are a lot cheaper ways to get it than going to school. I could have traveled the world for 10 years on what I spent for 4 years in college. Besides, simply living is experience - especially when we do it consciously.
Well, that is where you and I come in. When we think for ourselves and truly become aware of ourselves, we change the world around us. People only have the control over us if we let them, and we can become the best teachers to each other and ourselves once we start to open up. For example, our country is increasingly passing laws that are designed to control and repress the masses (see any of the "anti-terrorism acts" of the last decade). However, if 300 million of us decided to stop abiding by and accepting those laws, they have no power over us. That is what is so important for us to realize. That we are truly powerful. We can decide how we want to live - and then do it! A few thousand people yelling about how crazy all this spiritual talk is seems insignificant when there's millions of us living it. When we live consciously and not in fear, we take back the power that we've given away. We don't have to do meaningless work. We don't have to let others control us. It's a choice. I choose a life of freedom, love, and meaning. What about you?
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