Nourishment

[degringolade]

 

Man, healing is boring, that is all I gotta say on that matter.

So today I want to talk about my countrymen.  Now, let's be honest, for all that we pump ourselves up with our obligatory optimism and self-esteem rituals, we are a fairly average bunch.  Our education system is failing us, becoming a scam to allow the current possessors of the credentials to funnel off more than their fair share of the funny money circulating in the economy with the rapacious help of banks, Sallie Mae, and the Department of Education.  I went into hock sending my youngest to do some learning and have some fun at the local University, but they really didn't bother to teach him and he really didn't put in that much effort to learn.  So I get a couple more years pushing the rock, but truthfully, I don't mind. Now that he is off that wheel, he has decided that there is something to the life of the mind after all and appears to be actually thinking now.  Maybe after a year or two of being an autodidact, he will be able to go back and polish off the rough edges of that particular learning methodology.  I am actually more hopeful now than I was a year ago.

I guess that what make me sadder than anything is how going to University here has stopped being about teaching critical thinking, but has instead become a ticket-punching exercise, with rote learning and credentials and certificates that allow one to get a "good job" appearing to be the only goal worthy of pursuing.

I kinda thing that we are at the cusp of a pretty dramatic change in this attitude.  Lots of folks are seriously questioning the methodologies and goals of higher education and are not liking the answers.  The narrowing of the range for acceptable ideological thought is narrowing, and the persecution of unbelievers is becoming both evident and distasteful.  Academia has always had a touch of the "ivory tower" deal going on, but lately it has become endemic and the means of suppressing questions and dissent much more intrusive and spiteful than before.

So, now that part of the rant is over, I will try to connect this idea with the ideas from the last couple of posts.  The educational system that I so freely disparage is the fons et origo of the bourgeois culture that passes for the dominant majority here in the US of A.   It is currently how this tragically dysfunctional system scores supplicants to the dominant minority and through the indoctrination received, how it keeps the accepted in line and allows the bourgeois heritage to pass from generation to generation.

As I have stated in the past, I am on the fringes of the dominant minority, but I never, ever bought in.  I am first and foremost a Prole.  I am not ashamed of this, actually I quite proud of this.  But knowing both the self-absorbed coterie of the dominant minority and the steady marginalization of the proletariat to service that self-absorption, I am placing my bets on the proles.  

Because you see, at the end of the day, the bourgeois poseurs that inhabit the dominant minority and control the gates of the educational system that serves as the gatekeeper for entry to that dominant minority will find that the canaille massing outside their ivory tower aren't there to ask nice for entry, but are there to tear it down.