stay in school Young Man

You guys and your army.  You know I was going to go into the army.  When I signed up for my draft card it was kind of cool.  I was carrying around a draft card like a real man.  Later on my sensitive moral compass would not let me go to Vietnam, but possibly bigger in keeping me out  of khaki was that ROTC course they made us take in college.  Beagles was in ROTC in high school but the difference with that was it was full of guys who wanted to be in ROTC, so I don't  know, I reckon they got along better.  But everybody that entered a land grant college had to be in ROTC, so they treated us like we were draftees and they were officers.  All that trivial shit was really important, like marching around in the armory and polishing your brass and spit shining your shoes.  You had to stand at attention while some dickwad looked at your brass and your shoes and he always found something wrong so you always got demerits and the only way to work them off was to go into the ROTC office and do piddly shit.  Bunch of fucks.  I wasn't so much afraid of being shot by the Cong as I was of mouthing off to one those pricks and going onto KP and mouthing off at the cook and ending up in army jail.

But probably the real army wasn't that bad, after all everybody had to get along, and mostly you were just navigating these mild but rigid rules, like a long afternoon at Camp Swampy looking out for Sarge.  I am disappointed that nobody says "Halt, who goes there," but then the army is not known for its sense of humor.


Okay back to civ where agriculture is just beginning.  Nice for the hotshots who aren't getting their hands dirty anymore,  Maybe not for the farmers who used to ride bold and free hunting and feasting, and starving sometimes and who now at least had regular meals, but had to spend much of their days mucking in the mud.  Hamlets become cities become nations.  And now we have some better technology and better still we have writing, a storehouse of knowledge that doesn't go out when some wise guy dies or get jumbled when one guy tells another who tells another and on and on.

And now we have the Roman Empire and something like a middle class.  Oh there were slaves who were never going to go anywhere, but some of them got a break, some of them got to be big shots in the Empire, there were schools, you could study in them and get ahead.

You hit a little bump there with the fall of the Empire, but as the nations slowly arose they needed bureaucracies, and they needed learned men to run them.  As we enter the Renaissance we see a lot of schools, science is beginning to be dabbled in, math is making great strides, there is all that culture stuff.

The better educated guy is better off, but not so much the guy without the education.  But let's cross the ocean, and you know here we had a  big democracy.  All those European titles were in the ash bin, anybody putting on airs was not a regular guy and maybe he would be made fun of and maybe he would be tarred and feathered.

Maybe I know this because I went to education school and it was drummed into my head, but I don't think enough is made of it, is the establishing of public schools which were free and which people had to attend, more or less.  This came at a great cost, building the schoolhouses and paying teachers cost dough, and the loss of work from Johnny being away from the farm learning his ABCs must have been considerable.

But people didn't mind, they felt like it was for their own good, smarter kids would make more money.  A good kid got good grades.  Stay in school young man.  Smarter grade school kids made smarter high school kids made smarter college kids, and the whole American education system used to be the best in the world.  It was great, we were getting smarter all the time.

And we were getting richer, well not all of us, mostly the guys who were spending more time in school,  Better educated people know more, they should be running this country right?  But the thing is the better educated you are, the richer you are, and likely you become more interested in keeping your riches and not sharing them with anybody, where you should be liberal, with all this enlightened education, you are also rich and you become right wing.

That's as far as I am going today.  The main thrust is how a good thing, education, carries within it the seeds of an elite unwilling to share anything.