[size=150]1|A Brief Tirade On Education[/size]
“We have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.”—Henry David Thoreau (Walden, Reading, 1854)
I am both piqued and perplexed by these unremitting efforts to patch with cosmetic futility our intellectual straight-jackets, so pardon my consternation. If I am bitter about the conditional education of these United States, it is because after 159 years, the only significant systemic change came through Civil Rights (which, though of supreme necessity to social justice, left the worn out paradigm of perfunctory scholasticism unchecked). In suffocating the intellect and fundamental human curiosity, I may say we trend toward decadence. Contra the Akademia, we have the compulsory education machine—the regulated mass production of human chattel, divested by the University to the Corporation, with letter grades (a la the FDA) correlating to the product’s potential production of capital.
When we are spending $818 billion to care for the health of a people who can’t evidently be bothered to care for themselves¹—an esprit de corps of corpulence—$773 billion on the old (social security), $677 billion on National Defense (offense, rather), $541 billion on bonds and debentures, $124 billion on veterans, $93 billion on transportation, and yet the education of our country’s future must take a back seat to the buses themselves, sharing a diminutive $90 billion with ‘training’ and ‘social services’, it is clear where our priorities do not lie.
If one invests wisely and affluently in it, education may offer greater return than any other enterprise. I believe the modern epoch’s condition itself stresses the need for such an investment; perhaps it’s elitism, but I think that in the era of nuclear fusion², particle physics, the Third World (or even Third Worldism), and putting all of our eggs, contra Heinlein, into one basket³, we should be setting the bar a little higher than ‘reality television’, the Supreme Court’s qualifying pizza as a vegetable (for Budget’s sake), bureaucracy perplexing enough to cock even Kafka’s brow, and spending tens of billions of dollars on grown men and women playing games with each other in obnoxiously variegated spandex (or driving in circles at ridiculous speeds for four hours).
We pay tuition for a number of reasons, most of which are merely rationalized, not rational, and none of which are justified. In the act of contributing to our professor’s salary, we affirm at least five egregious, demoralizing pseudo-truths: one, that the university should be a sort of mutant leasing-company/information-brokerage before it is a place of learning; two, that the professor’s time, person, and intellect are quantifiable commodities; three, that said pedagogue’s salary accurately reflects this quantification; four, that the student is receiving a service rather than ultimately providing one; five, that dictation is synonymous with education.
The university, in my estimation, should be a community of mutually curious individuals with the collective desire to improve their society through the acquisition, analysis, and application of knowledge, artistry, and wisdom. If education is in a state of deficiency, its State will be insufficiently educated—and its people so much more so that the two lock eyes in monomaniacal contention, dumbstruck by each other’s incredulity. Simply put, if education suffers, politics suffer, and thus the people suffer two-fold. As such, it is a service to all to educate the individual, and though the individual is benefited, the reward to her society is astronomically greater, so by what logic should she pay for her own education? Tax dollars are supposed to fund universally beneficial services which a government provides its people, and I believe there are none more universally beneficial than education.
End Notes
1: I’m not speaking of being able to afford health insurance, but rather of taking the initiative to lead a healthy lifestyle; neither glioblastomas nor diabetes really constitute lifestyle choices, but eating deep-fried sticks of butter and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day most certainly do.
2: Bussard’s Polywell, now being developed by the US Navy with promising results, is just one project offering marketable fusion in the near future.
3: “The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.” (R. Heinlein) That is, we are currently stuck on this planet, we cut funding to NASA, ground the space shuttles, and the Kepler space telescope, which until recently was spearheading our search for potentially habitable exoplanets, has lost its ability to be pointed where we want to point it, so now, we’re counting on a bunch of upstart entrepreneurial aerospace corporations to ensure our longevity.
[size=150]2|Musing On Amusing Technoculture[/size]
When in response to her own gravity Gaia insinuates into our corporeal form biological servomechanisms, the manifest function of which concerns the assumption of various invertebrate poses conducive to the conservation of energy, and when the studies of semiology, psychology, and sociology are employed in the exploitation of human desire to stoke the fires of capital accumulation, we must provide ourselves with cords and carabiners of truly indomitable stuff to stand fast against the avalanching zeitgeist of avolition, anodynia, and recumbence.
Sometime recently (Saturday, October 26th, l’apres-midi), I encountered a generic and rather irritating computer problem, the precise nature of which is irrelevant and thus ignored forthwith. Following the social convention of my day, I opened up a web browser, double-clicked my Google shortcut, clicked inside the designated search box—which has a marvelous feature unfortunately akin to those poor souls whose compulsion it is to complete the sentences of others, but with more authoritative punch from referencing regional incidence data—and I offered three words: why does my. I stopped typing when I noticed the four autocompletions, ultimately for their social implications, but initially because I couldn’t stop laughing.
Forgive me, but there’s really no modest way to go about this. If these autocompletions, largely a measure of statistics, are any sort of judge, the objects of possession we most commonly inquire Google about are (in order of frequency), our vaginae, our vaginae once again, our stomachs, and our eyes; the concomitant verb or verb phrases were smell bad, itch, hurt, and twitch (respectively). Laissez-vous un moment de rire.
Aside from the ribald humor, we do well to acknowledge that all four concern either pain, annoyance, or hygiene, and perhaps in some of the more embarrassing territories of these subjects. What the Google search would seem to provide here is a more comfortable alternative to discussing unpleasant but non-life threatening bodily functions over tea with grandma, dinner with a date, or even a scheduled visit to your primary care physician. Because of its anonymity, its mobility, and its convenience, I think people will more commonly seek information not limited to their health which they may have otherwise forgone for any number of reasons metonymic to pride and chastity. On the other hand, such a paradigm may also lend itself to hypochondriacs, arrogant self-medication, and even to the global pullulation of Japan’s endemic hikikomori, a lifestyle all the more feasible with the advent of the cyber-marketplace and associated delivery services.
Another possibility is the emergence of a nouveau-traditional delinquent behavior: in the days of yore, we tipped cows; in days of .org, we tip user data. Could some very tenacious band of miscreant webizens and neckbeards be actively searching unpleasantries en masse as a sort of anti-modest gag? Perhaps my anecdote is the recreational product of the silicon valley equivalents of Beavis and Butthead, or even just the punchline to some postmodernist’s derisive caricature of contemporary American society: “We’re still tweaked out on over-prescribed Adderall, our fast-acting antacids aren’t acting fast enough, and we need to restore our stock of Vagisil—now with the fresh scent of Gain!”
In short, the ramifications of the evolving technoculture are not easily defined past a strictly cosmetic symptomology, and the resultant benefit-deficit relationship is rather ambiguous at present, but the internet community nonetheless remains a fecund and often comical source of insight into both the subjective and intersubjective realms of human being.