Give yourself a cookie if you have any idea what is going on in the title of this post.
So have you heard? Obama is giving some speeches to the kiddies in the States. Parents are pulling their kids because they don’t want their kids to be indoctrinated with socialism. Mind you this is all going to be happening at public schools so the irony tastes like taco day. I wonder if any of the pulled kids qualify for free lunch.
Anyway, I have no reason to rant on politics. It’s a dead discussion as far as I’m concerned. That’s not to say there is no valid in discussing politics, but really, are people changing their minds that much? I was walking in Osaka the other day and they had big rallies for getting people to vote. Now mind you that they want you to vote but of course only for the person they support. Vote for anyone else and you may as well not vote at all, right? I just see the whole shebang going on and I have to wonder, who is persuaded beyond what beliefs they made on their own or got from their childhood1? Is shouting out hard to understand words while waving cardboard cutouts of the person you want elected really changing that many minds is something I wondered. I mean, it’s great to have a cause, more power to you. I just question the efficiency. Those cardboard cutouts can’t be cheap.
That was a tangent.
Moving on, the inspiration this posted above aside there is the fact that I have been actually part of an education system for two years where I am on the other side of the classroom. Looking on Facebook and seeing people who have left this job and going back to the sitting and listening portion scares the ever living fuck out of me. Dudes with several degrees talking about going for another makes my blood run cold. Jesus fuck, is this where we have gotten in the world that we have to keep going again and again through the damn educational system just to get by in life? Wasn’t going to college about getting ahead2? With the way things are going it just frightens me.
Well, and I say this with no harshness to those of you going back to the educational system, it seems going back could be a safety mechanism for some. Sure, we go on about how much we hate school, but let’s face it. Up until at least eighteen years of age in the States3 you’re at school. Then you go to college. Why not keep going to keep sticking to the familiar? This is why I can’t let myself go back unless it is the only option for me. Even then I don’t know. After two years of studying Japanese much more vigorously on my own time I really have learned that the educational system only can carry you so far. It is our reliance on the ease of paperwork claiming to prove something rather than the time it takes to really determine if someone has the skills without the paperwork.
It’s frightening. Completely scary and makes the future seem bleaker than it really should. But the worst part about these educational systems that we are forcing ourselves through again and again post secondary education is that, at least for me, it has killed curiosity. The most powerful tool for learning has been stripped away from me and battered until I cannot recognize it anymore. Granted, it is my own fault for allowing this to happen but we never really know what we can lose until it is gone. I can only hope that I can learn how to restore what is once lost.
The only thing I know is no school is going to teach me how.
