How to mold today's youth the honest way

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Back in my day as a kid the teachers made the grown up world seem like a fair, honest, and equal place where hard work or determination would get a person to their eventual goals in life as they got older. A place where authority was fair and looked out for you. Where authority was there to protect your interests as a individual.

Ah, the days of a childhood innocence and naivety, which unfortunately lasted until graduation in some form or another in my late teens.

To this day I see a bunch of wandering eighteen year olds clueless about the world they’re about to be thrown into. It’s horrifying as it is equally exciting.

I remember the days growing up wanting to be a astronaut when I was a little kid.

As I got older in highschool that transformed from being an astronaut to an anthropologist, archeologist, and writer, but needless to say I never quite met the cut for all that.

Probably because I was too busy getting stoned, listening to rock ‘n’ roll, and chasing after loose women. :-"

Anyways, I think it is about time we’re all honest with the children for their sake, don’t you think?

Children, here’s the deal, your teachers aren’t going to tell you the truth and neither is the public education institutions, so it’s up to older Tyrannus to tell you the truth of reality instead.

If you don’t become a perfect little computer calculator or Microsoft (Trademark INC) word processor, you’re going to grow up in a world very cold and indifferent to your dreams to the point of being soul sucking. You’re going to grow up to be a corporation’s serf or slave making minimum wage where every two weeks you’re going to want to drink yourself to death after a trip from the liquor store to kill the pain of your miserable existence every paycheck. Poor, you’ll look forward to having no friends, no sexual partner, and absolutely no social life cause you can’t afford to go anywhere or hang out around with other people. That’s if you’re even lucky enough to find a part time job to support yourself in this great global economic recovery. Even wage slave jobs are hard to come by anymore children.

If you’re unlucky you’ll find yourself shooting up tar heroin living under a bridge somewhere where if you’re a woman you’ll have to sell your body to the highest bidder just to survive and get your drugs to numb the pain of just being alive in your situation. You’ll probably be selling blowjobs in the back alley across the street of some random place.

Your home will be a cardboard box in the middle of some damp wet alley and worse you’ll have to worry about that crackhead Jimmy that lives next door who might try to knife you in your sleep for that five dollars you found outside in a park someplace.

Also, keep in mind with this wondrous economic recovery children you will probably be living with mom and dad until your twenty eight because jobs are hard to come by even to put yourself through college anymore even with the luck of being successful intellectually. If you’re lucky your parents will be loaded with money and they won’t mind. If you’re not that is the reality you are looking forward to.

If you’re a orphan and don’t really have any family or parents, you’re simply just fucked. Not only are you going to have to find a way to study for school, but you’re going to have to hold a fulltime, or in this new world economy part time job, paying for your monthly living, and finding a way to go to school full time simultaneously all at once.

So, pay attention in school and do your studying, because this is the world you’re growing up in. This is the reality of everything you have to look forward to.

Don’t trust authority! Those mother fuckers are out to get you and bleed you dry.

Learn to obey, conform, and be successful for your corporate overlords. Do this and you’ll be alright children.

Remember what Tyrannus here has told you.

2

Yep. What you really told them is a cautionary tale: if you wile away your high school years getting stoned and fucking around, you’ll pay for it the rest of your life. If you make the connection between “contributing useful output” with “receiving equal or better returns” you might have a chance. School feels like it sucks and the idea of useful production seems lame in a world where everything is given to you. Trust your teachers and invest time into producing quality output. Along the way find the kind of production that thrills you and do more of it till you master it. If you want to be an astronaut, stay for and learn physics on the weekends. You may not make it but u might instead get a job at nasa doing something else. Bottom line, it’s hard out there. But if u kick ass you won’t come up empty handed. If you reach for the stars you may never get em but you won’t end up with a handful of dirt, I.e corporate drone or homeless man.

3

Honest need not mean the same as pessimistic. What I think it is important, above all, to emphasise to young people (and older people) is that the academy is dead as a mechanism for meritocracy, and that actually being capable in the real world is becoming ever more important.

Unless you want to become a banker, in which case kill yourself.

4

Obviously I can see that you are being comically hyperbolic, but honestly I don’t think this is a realistic look at the situation. There are still plenty of middle of the road jobs which pay reasonably well, aren’t too difficult but are intellectual stimulating. Teaching, for example. Counselling. Working in the civil service. Retail management etc. You only need some semi-decent grades at school, a middle of the road University degree and a little bit of determination to get these kinds of jobs.

5

Obviously you guys have never dealt with sincere cries for help before.
You don’t answer them with “don’t give up! Your need for approval just needs my support!”

The reality is that there exists a waste of talent and huge sections of even “more developed country” populations that have essentially been forsaken.

“Kicking ass” means nothing if it is not directly vocational and appropriately directed towards that expected end. And what if you don’t kick ass? You don’t get your dreams because you were retarded enough to think that you might be able to achieve them. I may not be part of this section of the population, but they sure as hell exist. Their company positions, if achieved at all, are at the mercy of their employer: fuck your interests and dreams, you will be this and this only. I don’t know how they live with themselves - but then the general lower class demeanour of aggression and frustration befits them perfectly. Who wouldn’t be, given their lot. But that’s not allowed… so where do they go? It’s a trap - for more and more people.

6

Universities are a scam.

7

You don’t have to trust your teachers, but it helps to use them and the situation. Do as well as you can without destroying your soul, or find some kind of apprentice type approach and do well enough to get a GED. If you can actually do things, this can lead to jobs, but they will want minimal papers. GED ----} Community College (where you can at least choose subjects) ----} better colleges is one route. At no time to you have to take seriously the worldview, Pollyanaish or even meritocracy advocating and believing in, of your teachers. They spit out grades, grades can help and hurt, determine how much you are willing to put in an use the system and do not, unless this seems to be working for you, take it like it is an interpersonal relationship. Schools tend to have hysterically outmoded forms of pedagogy and a lot of what they teach you will never be used in any career you will ever have. Basic math will, Reading Writing speaking will. From there some careers will use some of the stuff. Scientists will need to pick up a lot of stuff in math and science of course. But if you are heading into business, for example, math and speaking, to a lesser extent Writing are all you need, if you know how to apprentice yourself and/or can sell yourself.

I found my education very insulting and in a sense my advice would be to not take these people seriously, in the sense that they are wise and understand the World. Take them seriously as people who have hoops for you and these hoops may well be Worth jumping through even if they are illogical choices for hoops. Use them. Do not treat teachers in a Kantian way, unless they have fallen down in the street. Then you can drag them to the side so they don’t get run over. But otherwise, treat them more as anthropological oddities with Power or gifts. Very hard as a kid to know how much those gifts are Worth. Soem people can do average or barely passing for a long time and then, when more choice is available post high school, they thrive and do just as well as people who studied their asses off and and ass kissed for 12 years. But you can’t Count on this. Such a person has a lot of confidence and good intuition.

I would suggest a general mercenary attitude. And that is what you will face in them and in the system. You may find, on occasion, an actual ally in a teacher. But generally you will find them elsewhere. Not because teachers are bad or stupid, but they are pretty locked into a machine. Machines can be well designed and useful, but they are Machines and most schools and pedagogies are not well designed.

IOW I took my teachers to be the wise members of my tribe for a while. When this was clearly not the case and beyond that they viewed me as basically a bag of original sin - these were public school teachers, I am Writing metaphorically - who should have no Control over his own education and should be a kind of tape recorder who makes no unauthorized movements or sounds, I was bitterly disappointed. Partly thinking there was something wrong with me and partly thinking society was only insane. In fact they are not members of your tribe. They are factory workers and you are the manufactured items. If at some Point you are treated as a living, creative creature, this can be a pleasant surprise.