College
From The Encyclopedia of Pointless
I finally figured it out. It took three tries, several thousand dollars worth of tuition fees and textbooks ordered from e-bay, and at least as much money in Guinness and Cuervo, but I figured it all out.
College is for stupid people.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that everyone who’s in college is there because they’ve suffered some blunt trauma to the head. After all, some of the most intelligent and influential people in the world have matriculated through the finest education rackets on the planet. The truth is, though, most of those people would be just as intelligent and just as influential if they’d not been educated by this system. Not only that, but they’d probably be seventy or eighty thousand dollars wealthier.
A long time ago, education was something reserved for the upper class, for the nobility. The peasants didn’t get educations because, well, they didn’t need them. After all, what use does a turnip farmer have for understanding Kantian metaphysics? And what possible application does Mendel’s Principle of Segregation have for someone whose primary function in life is to hammer out farm implements on a forge? Education is dangerous, at least in the hands of the serfs.
Now, though, by means of democracy and activism we’ve gone out of our way to hand education on a silver platter to those who are underprivileged. Primary and Secondary school is not only free, it’s mandatory. Ironically, the punishment for excessive truancy tends to be expulsion. I digress. Over the last two hundred or so years our education system has morphed into the amalgam that it is today. From the days of one room school houses on the Western plains, we have reached the heightened enlightenment of public education.
Like sheep, young boys and girls are funneled through the stocks and dutifully fed the information that makes them into responsible and productive citizens of the country. Less apt students are directed to the trades, and begin rewarding careers as auto mechanics, contractors, and janitors. Others are office workers, retail clerks and gas station attendants. Beyond that, we had to have a means of separating the sheep from the goats.
So we sent the sheep to college. We educated them into oblivion, and the system is flawless. First, the college forces the student into debt, ensuring that they will be mandated to join society as a productive unit, if only to pay off that sum. Second, they subject those students to the lowest, basest forms of instruction on earth, with the simple platitude that ‘you don’t learn everything in the classroom. Expect three to four hours of homework for every hour you spend in class.’
Think about that.
What that means is that I am paying to be told what to read. I am being charged for the right to learn. I am being subjected to permanent incarceration in a society of nitwits in order to spend a few hours a week learning the ‘basics’ from somebody who will tell me that most of the work must be done on my own.
Review the facts.
1. You’re not stupid. That’s what they tell you, and it’s probably true. In general, stupid people don’t go to college. 2. You know how to read. As it turns out, literacy is a primary requisite for survival in a post-agricultural society. 3. Books cost less than college classes.
Let’s put these things together. I’m sure you can see where this is going. You know how to read, and obviously you know how to understand what you’re reading. There are THOUSANDS of books available in the world to read. And all of them are far less expensive than your standard college class. Hell, if you get the urge to go buy a textbook, by all means, do so.
I’m not telling you to abandon college. I just want you to realize the truth about your situation. You are not going to college for an education. You can find one of those at your local bookstore or public library. Even the dreaded IntarWubs has some inkling of information that could be used to make you a better person.
No. You are going to college for one reason only. At the end of your brutal and inhuman torture they will hand you a piece of paper that certifies for the rest of the society that you have forever bought into the lie that you are worthless as an individual, as a human being, without validation from the system.
I pity you. I pity myself. I pity us all.
| -- Forbidden Void |
| Click here for more by this author |
