I can’t tell lately if people are going crazy, born stupid or the result of some environmental
problem. It comes down to the point of even the simplest thing such as driving a car. I
wonder if people still have to go through Driver’s Education anymore. Is it still a physical
class? Or has it become an online venture because looking around the highway, it seems like
the latter.
At any rate… It’s not only on the road. It’s all around. It’s not funny either. Lack of education
and culture has been linked to violence in more than a few cases. We see the violence level
go up as the public school system goes down and there is an awful lot of pressure these days.
Obviously too much pressure on stupid people is not a good equation. And people, we are
getting stupider by the minute.
Practically unsupervised online educational programs are the norm now, while charter schools and privatized institutions steal funding from the public ones by the day. The difference? Your child has to
jump through someone’s hoops to get into the charter or private schools. Whatever those
hoops may be. Money, auditions, lottery… Essays… Means to say one child can go where
another cannot based on someone pick and choosing them if you ask me. That’s fine for a private school someone is paying for but to make this the normal “public” system is insane. It’s not good and what does this all mean?
It means we must begin to realize that if we do not take our education into our own hands for
the moment, that we will continue to “dumb down” as a population.
The shame of the online school system is the lack of supervision. I have personally seen a
child, supposedly going to online school, not going to school at all whatsoever. Didn’t even
have access to the internet for God’s sake. No one cared. No one stepped in. 6 months went
by… She finally enrolled herself into the lottery at the local charter and got things straight. Her uniforms for 4 days cost just over $125.00. She was 14 or so. She did it all on her own. She’s back in online school now and she is in total control with a want to learn that is the drive behind her.
This is a real girl in a real world but she represents all of America right now. We are
floundering in a theoretical online school with no guidance. Our educational system on the
public level is full of individuals no older than our children. It is full of outdated material and
methods trying to mix with new methods of teaching the same things we have already perfected. Wasting time. Wasting and trying to streamline a process that is an organic institution. It is full of other problems as well. The lack of funding for standardized metal detectors and security officers being one of them.
This is an escalating problem that we must take into our own hands. Not by storming the
proverbial castle, or showing up naked to the next Washington shin dig, but by educating
ourselves. Using the library while it’s still around. Teaching our kids to teach themselves,
expand their knowledge factors and continue it throughout life. Being prepared for a future that may not provide such easy access to information that should already be stored in your head.
Here’s an idea… Put away the electronics and read. Use the electronics to educate, not
medicate. There’s an 80’s style logo for you kids. Instead of sitting on your computer looking
at mindless gossip about pointless shit, use that time to look stuff up. Write it down. Study
things. Keep notebooks. Remember school and bring those techniques back into your life
because if we don’t… and we don’t keep these things ourselves… we may lose them forever.
We become vulnerable to whatever bullshit they tell us we need to know as well because no
one knows better or the difference.
So here we begin to see a future shaping up that will be neither generous or gracious to the
(a) people who cannot afford private or charter schools and (b) people being manipulated, those
who do not know how to distinguish fact from fiction because they lack the appropriate
learned reasoning abilities due to lack of decent education.
Know, that while technology is a wonderful thing on many levels it still denies the human the
development of the natural ability to problem solve. Problem solving makes us smarter.
Looks bad for us here at ground level.
Please keep the faith. Read a book. Take your education back and keep it. Collect books.
Go the extra and learn about some obscure old writer or artist. Keep our language, learn old
words that no one uses anymore. Use them and imagine those who don’t know the meanings
will look them up later on. Learn history.
Learn to read and write cursive as it will become a second language shortly.
The original Constitution of our country. The very document that gives us our rights. Is written
in cursive. Do we not see the gravity of this situation? How can we argue a thing that we
cannot read? Sure, we have copies… but when those copies are corrupted will we have to
turn to some age old interpreter? Some determiner of hieroglyphs?
Keep learning and do not rely on some bunch of people – just like us, who say they are in
charge but clearly are not in charge of shit, to educate you and your loved ones in total.
And it’s hard.
And it gets harder as more public resources dissapear.
One must make the same effort as that 14 year old girl who decided all on her own she
would not be uneducated or unknowing.
Here is a scenario, it’s simple but it seems relevant to the education crisis and the knowledge
level of many people.
A woman goes into a store to buy milk and is told she needs a state permit to buy the milk.
She is told she can purchase this permit at the front counter. The woman goes to the counter
and asks for the permit. She is told it costs $25.00. She pays this and is given nothing but
when she returns to the cooler to get the milk the man asks for her permit again. She has
nothing to show him but explains she bought it. The man tells her she must not have paid the
fee for the paper. She goes back and pays another $10.00 for a blank piece of paper. She
goes back to the cooler man. He sends her back to the counter for a different permit with
writing on it. It’s $5.00 to get the printed copy.
The lady now cannot afford the milk, but she has a piece of paper with some shit printed on
it. She passes up the other grocery stores thinking she cannot afford to go through the
process again and that this is a new law.
The cooler man and the clerk split the lady’s $40.00 and go have a beer.
Is the lady stupid? Why didn’t she ask around? Doesn’t she have a smart phone and Google?
Not on the news? How could this happen in real life? There are many reasons for this. Many
different causes. Maybe she only speaks Spanish and the clerks are the only ones around who speak it as well. Maybe she can’t read and is disadvantaged that way. Maybe she can’t communicate with others well… That’s not the point. The point is that the woman did not know something when she needed to and someone else, someone who would manipulate and take advantage, did. The other point, is that the woman, naively believing the two clerks, didn’t even try to further her education on the subject by learning more about the permit thing.
Whatever, it’s a stupid scenario but of course the real question is this:
Who are we the people in this story? And Why? And What can we do about it for the future?