> The better your
> education, the more you are pissed off at the state of the nation,
> the world, and the more likely you are to revolt against the whole
> shit bag trip.
I wish this were true, but is it? Unless you mean 'education' in some sense different from the ordinary one, which equates it with 'schooling'.
Most of the of the people I know who are 'well-educated' in the ordinary sense are great believers in conventional wisdom. As are most people who are not 'well-educated'. It seems to require a particular kind of bloody-minded personality to take a whack at the pasteboard mask, educated or not.
It's an interesting question whether one is more or less likely to take that whack if one is 'well-educated'. I suspect it's less -- just because one has a greater psychic and even monetary investment in the system -- but this is just a guess.
> That's why working class kids get no education, even if they go to
> college.
I should have read to the end. When you say 'education' you do in fact intend something distinct from 'schooling', do you not? Quite right if so.
I was on the rubber/road interface of this process for a while. A good many of the kids in my cellblock were what I would call 'working class' (though they would surely have called themselves 'middle class'). My job was to school 'em, but I tried to educate 'em too.
They mostly didn't want it. They were just looking to get their ticket punched. Understandable enough. I punched it for 'em, and felt fine about that. I especially loved it when I gave an 'A' to somebody who had worked really hard, and then five minutes later, another 'A' to somebody who had done the bare minimum. It made me feel like the enlightened employer in the parable of the vineyard (http://bit.ly/iKREcv for those who aren't Bibelfest).
But otherwise, it wasn't much fun for me -- like being a kindly toll collector on the turnpike. That's why I gave it up. If I should ever have the opportunity to teach something I knew about, to people who were there merely because they wanted to know it too -- well, I won't say that would be better than sex, because nothing is better than sex. But it would be right up there with counterpoint.
-- --
Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com