Educational Woes

Hey continuity and following up on a promise from an earlier post, what more could you ask for?  If you ask for lucidity so help me I will hippopotamus milkshake.  Any who, lets attempt a modicum of intelligence.  The education system in the country is under attack.  It has changed drastically from when I came out of it about twelve and a half years ago (fuck, math again).  Not that change is a bad thing.  Change is inevitable.  Inevitability, of course, does nothing to prove it being good or bad.  Death is inevitable and that is generally agreed upon to be not so good in the scheme of things.  Slightly off topic but relating in the end nonetheless a name some important things that have been discovered in the past hundred or so years.  I’ll start:

• Automobiles
• Flight
• The Internet
• Microchips
• The Blooming Onion
• Moving pictures
• Some vaccines and shit

A whole bunch of those were due to what I call the ingenuity of curious and intellectually hungry Americans.  The smart asses among you will know that film was ‘discovered’ in the 1890’s by Frenchman (lumiere brothers)* but most of the discoveries afterwards that expanded a process that only allowed about sixty seconds of black and white grainy silent film to what we have now were discovered by Americans.  Like that asshole braggart Thomas Edison.  His greatest claim was as the first patent holder on being a douche bag.  This intellectual curiosity, this thirst for more very much seems to be missing.  Perhaps due to things like cinema and then every increasing trend towards sitting on your ass watching television or playing video games.  I like those things.  They constitute part of my happy time.  Along with other activities like eating** and vocally disliking things.  I think to an extent this country has been anti intellectualism.  We don’t reward curiosity and knowledge like we could.  We don’t elevate the importance of intellectual growth.  Socrates would be very upset.  That is after the whole transitional period where he intones “holy crap, I’m not dead” and “Why didn’t I think of pants?”  I’m not sure how he delivered “an unexamined life is not worth living” without wearing pants and people took him seriously.  I assume it was the beard.  If your generation’s claim to fame is better video games and boner pills we might need to change our priorities.  Boner pills.  I just wanted to write that twice sorry for interrupting pacing.

So there has been a culture shift or “dumbening” as it were.  But there is some much more bullshit to blame before I’m done.  As a patron of the internet it is imperative I lay blame at the feet of a whole bunch of people who are not me.  Let’s relate this to me.  Because fuck you I’m writing this.  In middle school we separated certain classes.  It was expressly stated but the classes were as follows; dumb kids; normal kids; kids with glasses.  We did this for math and English.  It was fucking awesome.  This meant if you were a fucking idiot you didn’t have to try and rub your five brain cells together and go at the pace of the rest of class.  Also if you were smart you didn’t have to read boring shit.  I was in the smart reading and writing class and normal math class.  Now I understand separating kids into this three categories or regular remedial and advanced might not be the best thing for fragile egos but middle school sucks.  It sucks for every damn person involved.  Its fucking miserable.  It much less fun than elementary or high school for the kids, parents and teaching.  You voice changes and cracks, pimples, raging hormones (why is it always raging? how about seething or head banging), boobies (well, that part was ok except for the fact they were inaccessible because of the pimples voice cracking and hormonal stupidity) and generally things are much more awkward.  But everything sucks at this time so fuck sheltering egos.  Is it really worth cramming all intellectual levels into one class and teaching at the lowest level.  Not a way to foster intellectual growth.

Here is some information on teachers.  They are not fucking babysitters.  It isn’t their job to discipline your unruly shit heads.  It’s their job to teach.  But bullshit rules and regulations are so tight teachers are expected to calmly take the abuse of these vile demon children.  You might say, or think, “Ben, not all children are vile or demon like.”  And I would say” yes, person who is talking to me in a manner prescribed to move this along, you are correct.”  But you only need one dickhead to derail everything.  We all know people like this now who are grown up and ruin everything,  all the time with amazing consistency, even in a large group settings.  The only really surprise here is why we keep hanging out with them or get surprised when the same shits happens.  It’s easy to blame the children here (and fun too).  But I generally find it not worth to lay blame at minors.  They aren’t really old enough to know yet how fucking stupid they are or the true consequences of their actions.  Realizing your own stupidity takes far more years than it should (self-deprecated humor redacted on account of awesomeness).

So the kids are unruly and teachers are neutered in their responses.  Some of that is good.  I’ve heard stories about people I know who aren’t that much older being paddled or smacked with a ruler.  And yes these stories involved nuns.  And no it was not kinky, you twisted monkey you.  But too much is obviously bad.

These guidelines come from somewhere.  Oh yes, our good friends the administration and the political machine.  Nothing bad comes from then!  I wonder if that italicize equals sarcasm bit would be a helpful thing to adapt here.  Oh, well, that would more editing than I want to deal with currently.  So we have neutered teachers, unsupportive/idiotic administration, bullshit political douche baggery.  NO child left behind was awesome!  (Did the italicize work?)  On an unrelated note I am sad that spell check has no appropriate response for douche baggery.  It does state that douche and bag should be separate but I think when using baggery it might be best to squish them together for maximum effect.  Douchebaggery.

Now perhaps the biggest offended in the whole thing.  Parents.  These are the assholes who should be instilling some manners into their little mouth breathers.  But instead they get upset when the teacher fails their child.  “All he did was cut class, disrupt class, fart musically,  swear like a pirate stubbing his toe (I use his toe as statistically there have been only two recorded cases of female pirates and roughly a metric fuckton of reported not female pirates), disrespect the teacher, not turn in assignments on time, not turn them in at all, cheat, lie, light shit on fire, and make rude sexual remarks to the opposite sex.”  I only wish this list was entirely made up or that parents were not surprised when their child didn’t pass because they put forth not effort.

The following anecdote is off topic but not.  I played this game called Rygar on the NES when I was a kid.  I wasted a large amount of time on it.  It was a game with only one life and no continues.  You missed a jump and fell game over.  Doesn’t matter if you put twenty hours in.  No passwords, no backsies, nothing.  I got good at it through dogged determination and the understanding that if I fucked up a little I had to start over.  I still have night sweats about this game.  Battletoads gives me full on night terrors.  I could get to the final boss after hours of laborious, but fun, game play and then get smashed piteously by the last boss.  Who you had to fight after going through all the previous bosses again one after before facing him.  There was punishment for failure.  Now look at Skyrim: Elder Scrolls V.  I can save as much as I want, whenever I want.  Death just puts me back a few moments.  Death is only a problem if I didn’t save a few minutes ago.  There is no punishment for fucking up.  I can keep running in to any room full of whatever level enemy with no fear of repercussion.  You can meta play this sonofabitch.  And just steal and kill or do whatever the hell you want and blithely scream fuck you narrative direction while you run around in pajamas.  Yay freedom.

That same sense of no repercussion of failure is present in modern education.  We aren’t failing kids.  Failure isn’t totally bad if you can learn from it.  We should be concernce only with what is best for the child right now, it is what is best for their future.  And sometimes that is telling them, “you fucked up and now you have accept the consequence of staying back.  Maybe next year you won’t snort salt up your nose.”  (Sadly I knew someone who did this on dare... with no money involved... in college.  Before you ask, no, it wasn't me.)  If there are ‘social promotions’ and a rampant lack of personal responsibility and little to no punishment for failure can you really blame kids for blowing off studying.  I hated school often.  But I’m damn glad I didn’t totally coast by the whole time.  I’m glad I occasionally got challenged and was forced to think critically.  It is our job as adults to make sure the next generation isn’t full of fucking idiots.  And we do this by fixing our education system.  Otherwise the list of inventions for the next hundred years will be decidedly un-American.

Ben

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumiere_brothers

**Note on eating.  The greatest collision of awesome and food is this:  The preference method for eating is punching the food item and licking your fist.  Not recommended for all food or those who hate being awesome.