edukashun

So the news continues to be the Dump show, just when you think he can't top himself there he is again.  Still shocked at the reps who, except for maybe like Kasich and McCain, continue to not have a bad word to say about him.  See, in the ideal world, the world of reason, when he finally goes down in a blaze of, well I don't want to use the word glory, a titanic shitstorm of biblical proportions, the American public, the scales having fallen from their eyes, will see how shallow and opportunistic the reps are and eschew them in favor of the deep-thinking and loving dems, and we will be well on our way to the worker's paradise.

But that is all dependent on reason and as we have seen in that last New Yorker article, humans are often impervious to it. I was interested in the part of the article where they said that winning arguments was more important to most people than reasoning it out.  Well it's so much faster, and it takes so little work, and it's kind of fun to just cast aside the truth and slather your opponent with insults and tell lies, and the audience loves it.  They hate being bombarded by facts like hard little stones and having to assemble the facts into something that is logical is so much more work than picking up some chant and yelling your lungs out.  And what gemutlichkeit standing arm and arm with your friends and neighbors and yelling, rather than sitting in some room trying to reason something out, how tedious, how like long division, Long division, already your nostrils are filled with that suffocating chalk dust while outside the dirty windows, the deer and the antelope play.

But for all that, school wasn't so bad.  There was kind of authoritarianism too it, don't talk, stand up straight, no giggling when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  There was all that dumb school spirit stuff and the rah rah America that went along with it. I wasn't crazy about it.  But I did learn things, most importantly to read and write, enough arithmetic to get by in the world, a rudimentary knowledge of history and geography, a peek into the sciences, though most of that was like thirty years out of date, a casual acquaintance with the arts.  Enough to get out in the world with, even enough to be able to figure things out on my own a little.

Well what more do you want?  When I was in edukashun skool they taught a little theory, and one of the theories was when free schooling was beginning in this country, maybe a little before the civil war, that since the gummint, the democracy (sort of), was funding these things, and since democracy gave each man an oar by which to steer the ship of state that it behooved everybody well that the schools prepare people to be intelligent voters.

Maybe it seems a little silly now, you hardly hear it, mostly the reason to get an education is to get a job.  I felt like I didn't learn that much in college, mostly my fault because I was a crappy student, but I thought the real value was that when I applied for a job I could say, look, I put up with four years of bullshit and that must be worth something.

Anyway now our public schools get less money every year and part of that is sucked off by charter schools that siphon off a lot of the better students and don't provide them any better an education than the public schools, and college anymore costs a fortune, so less education is going on and people are less analytic and more prone to select what they want to believe at the internet cafe, because it's all the same right, whatever appears on a website, why not pick the shinier stuff, the stuff that doesn't call on you to do any of that onerous thinking?

We are going to hell Gentlemen.