David’s Ramblings

I’m sorry to say it, but yes… I will be making another political post. Yes, to all of you who’ve been sending increasingly threatening hate mail, I heard you, I’m just ignoring you for now. I find political ranting fun.

These types of posts probably bother many of you. For those of you that it bothers, I’m sorry. I’m just in one of those political phases my life hits occasionally. I’ll get over it. I promise. The good news is that this one is not at all related to education.

Phew! Breathe a sigh of relief. I know you want to if you’ve been reading my last few posts. Don’t celebrate too quickly, since Mr. Mad Cow wanted to get into a debate about education and I may have to write a retort, but we can rest from that subject for at least a short while.

My post today is much more about America as a whole, rather than the specific facets like Public Education that make our country so – as those less inclined toward intelligence would say – “great”. Yes, my friends, it’s time for another Constitutional post. But this one is very special, for tomorrow is “Ignore the Constitution” day.

Celebrations are somewhat as follows, depending on where you live:

1. Wake up and realize that you still live in America. This holds with it certain values like owning an arsenal of firearms and being able to say stupid things like “The problems of Hurricane Katrina are all Bush’s fault” or “I’m a Democrat”. You decide to take these valuable rights for granted as usual.

2. You walk into some room and hear on the TV that it is “Constitution” day. You remember from history class something about a bunch of really old dudes sitting in a room and writing down some ideas, but you can’t remember if that was important.

3. You hear vague rumors of some sort of celebrations going on somewhere that probably involve a bunch of people sitting around talking about everything but the actual Constitution.

A fine day, for all involved… except the Constitution of course, but his opinion hasn’t mattered since FDR came around.

That’s right, FDR, who was perhaps the worst president in our history as far as slaughtering the Constitution is concerned. All of his “New Deal” projects, hardly a single one allowed for in the Constitution. You can’t justify your way around this fact. I defy you to do so. None of the “New Deal” programs were constitutionally sound. FDR knew it. That’s why he wanted to get more judges into the Supreme Court. They were likely to shoot him down.

Unfortunately for America today, they didn’t shoot him down. We now live in a country where the Constitution is completely and totally pointless. We celebrate it as a “living document” because whenever a person says so, it magically rewrites itself to fit a new meaning, like something out of Harry Potter. Or at least that’s the impression one would get listening to our government. The entire government seems to be reading an entirely different version of the Constitution from the one I see.

You simply can’t deny it. We say our Constitution is what sets us apart (which it was when we listened to it) but now it’s truly nothing but a memory for America today. Yes, how hypocritical a country we are to celebrate a document we so often blatantly ignore, and then ask countries like Iraq to write their own.

Have a merry Ignore the Constitution day. It’d be even merrier if you actually read and understood the Constitution, but I know that’s a bit of a stretch. Please feel free to substitute a true understanding of the Constitution with a challenging retort as to why I’m wrong.

I’m quite often critical of the public education system that I went through for the last 12 years of my life. Some people are curious just exactly what I have against school. Mad Cow has asked me to expound for the purpose of having a debate. So here goes.

Do I not like learning? Hardly. Maybe I’m just to dumb to realize that I could have been learning in High School? Hardly. Let me describe for you my objections to compulsory public education as a whole. The reasons I believe that Cyprus, and all that was a waste of my time. Then we’ll see what Mad Cow has in response.

Jumping right into it, one of the worst things about the education system is that it is unconstitutional (and thus illegitimate). The federal government has grossly overstepped its bounds in creating the current system, basically giving the Constitution the finger and saying, “to hell with the Founding Fathers.” I’m an avid Constitutionalist, and such topic could form an article in and of itself, but I’ll try to be brief in explaining to the general gist of it.

The Constitution sets out a list of powers the Federal government has. Is public education on there? No. Is anything close to Education in there? Nope. Is there a law that would allow the Federal government to come in and add that power after the fact? Yes. It’s called an amendment. Has the Federal government ever made an amendment allowing for them to control education (or Social Security and Welfare for that matter)? Not at all. Every other power not enumerated is clearly left for the states in the Constitution, but it doesn’t seem the states are in charge when there’s a national Department of Education, now does it?

So, aside from being constitutionally unsound, public education is good isn’t it? I mean, I know it’s against everything this country stands for to break its own constitution, but they should just add that in, right? In its current sense, no. Indeed, I can not deny the fact that an education is important for every person, but that’s not at issue here. The compulsory education system is.

The real question is whether our current system is what can be called an education. This divides itself into two smaller questions. Is the current education system necessary to gain an education? If not, for what purpose does it exist?

To answer the first requires a simple look at homeschooled students. Do they require the regimented grading and age separation, the 12 years of minutely defined study, or anything else “educational” the compulsory system offers? No. Did our forebears suffer without the “godsend” of compulsory education? No. Washington was a surveyor by 17, which required extensive amounts of trigonometry. Farragut commanded his first naval ship at age 12. Edison never had more than 3 months of formal schooling. None of the works of any of these men can be called small by any means.

Of course the retort to those latter claims is that they were somehow more extraordinary than any other person can hope to be. I think it would be a fallacy to consider them and the many others that never experienced what we now call public education were simply better than the kids going today. They all received an education, but their education was real and applied to their life, where the “educations” provided today are boring and don’t apply to anything.

It would be a stretch to call public education a necessary aspect to a child’s life, at least in a beneficial sense. People too often dismiss the value of the education one can gain simply by living life. It is obvious at this point to mention that doctors and other professions do require some schooling, but college can hardly be likened to the public education system.

So our public education system doesn’t fill in some mysterious lack of an education. Why is it there then? Let’s look at the words of Alexander Inglis, a proponent for the current public education system. His book “Principles in Secondary Education” (1918) described many reasons for the public education system to be adopted nationwide, and he was supported by those seeking legislation to make it happen. Let’s take a look at what functions he thought school would have:

1. The “adjustive” or “adaptive” function: schools are to establish fixed reactions to authority. They are to ensure that all students respond properly when told what to do.

2. The “integrating” function: schools are to make students as alike as possible.

3. The “diagnostic and directive” function: the school is to determine each student’s ‘proper’ social role.

4. The “differentiating” function: once a role has been determined, the school is to ensure that they are sorted and trained only as much as necessary.

5. The “selective” function: the school is to label the unfit and ensure that they are selected out of the population, as per Darwin’s natural selection theory.

6. The “propaedeutic” function: schools are to ensure their continued existence by making a few ready in their role to preform these functions on the next generation.

I don’t know about you, but this is slightly disturbing, if true. If you think these functions are appropriate for a government to be doing: choosing appropriate roles and tagging the unfit, I can not appeal to you further, for you do not believe in the freedoms this country is based on. For those that would be concerned, let us view those functions and see if they are being applied:

1. Schools establish fixed reactions to authority in several ways. Dictating exactly what must be learned, how it must be learned, even when exactly you can go to the bathroom. This quite obviously meets the function of establishing obedience in the large majority, for it’d be silly to consider just walking out of class without a hall pass.

2. Schools make students alike. It’s no question that we are being trained to enter the workforce. We heard rumors about it all the time. “Companies are coming to us and saying students aren’t good enough writers, so we’re going to make sure you’re all better writers.” It’s almost as if they’re packaging us and preparing us as products to be picked up by the companies. Our educations are dictated based on what we’ll “need” in the workforce by way of forced credits to graduate.

3. Students are separated and categorized all the time. That’s what grades are for. That’s what age level separation is for. That’s what AP and resource classes are for. Kids are being categorized and sorted, this fact is undeniable.

4. The results of the categorization are easily evident. Every student is sort of put into a track. “Smart kid”, “Average”, “Dumb” and it’s pretty much impossible to break out of that once they’ve been labeled. How many resource kids catch up, really?

5. Are kids being selected out? If you haven’t seen this in our school systems, I’m not sure what you’re looking at.

6. We’re getting more and more people every day that believe public education is the way to go in society. The support has been ingrained, and of course there are new teachers teaching still.

It’s quite obvious that there is something going on in the school systems, and it’s not about teaching. What is it about? It’s about turning those in the system into whatever specifications are laid down. What are those specifications? To make children. Well-trained, completely docile, hard working, unthinking children. You can see the childish aspects of those in the system across the board.

Maturity is a scarce thing in high school, and there’s a good reason: mature people don’t make big business happy. They don’t buy the $150 pair of tennis shoes they don’t need. They don’t need the constant glow of the TV or computers. They don’t buy thousands of dollars on credit when they can’t afford it. They don’t question the norm and think inventively. I’m not suggesting there’s a conspiracy to make the children stupid, I’m just suggesting that it works out for the people with the money funding the program.

These are my issues with the compulsory public education system. Cyprus is not guiltless. It was doing its task as set apart above. I just hope it didn’t work.

When I look back on my high school years, I remember two things: how much I hated them, and the other thing which involved some stuff I’m not so proud to mention… suffice it to say that it involved a calculus teacher, a ruler, and a page of sexual innuendo… besides, the first is more than enough for any person to spend about 8 more paragraphs on.

The first thing you notice when you walk into high school is how unhappy everyone is. They’re all just totally devoid of happiness. Some people learn to ignore the fact they are unhappy, while others, such as cheerleaders, get special surgeries from the same doctors that help Michael Jackson “breathe a little better” so that smiles are permanently glued to their face (glued, that is, until they hit twenty and realize that there’s a life beyond high school and they don’t have any clue how to move around in a world without mini-skirts and pompoms.) Whether they get the special surgeries or not, the whole school is unhappy. You can see it.

The teachers are unhappy because they realize that they’ll have to spend yet another year teaching idiots who can’t spell skate without the 8. The students are unhappy, well, because half of them are girls. Then the administration is unhappy because the government doesn’t give them enough money for how many students they keep unhappy on any given day. High school is just a unhappy, depressing place. This can be shown by a simple look at the statistics:

0 Goth Kids – 1967
Too Many Goth Kids – 2005
(# Goth Kids attending Cyprus – Year)

The startling trend that shows is an alarming increase in Goth kids since the 1960′s. If the world is so black and dark that you have to wear black makeup and clothing to keep in style, what kind of world are you living in? Apparently high school. I mean really, how many Goth kids exist outside of high school? Really? Does anyone ever see them? I’m gonna go with a no, because they’ve probably either A) all committed suicide by the time school is over, B) learned that life isn’t so unhappy it’s okay for a guy to wear makeup, or C) decided that they are going to spend the rest of their life in their room contemplating to themselves the meaning of pain and suffering . Whatever the case, society wins, but again we’re straying from the point – which, being put plainly, is cafeteria food.

Cafeteria food is probably the number one reason students become anorexic or bulimic. For all those stupid videos and assignments we had to do in health regarding these stupid eating disorders, you’d think one of the teachers would catch on to it. The logic behind it is rock solid. If anorexics don’t eat food, and school food is food, then anorexics don’t eat school food. Thus, anorexics are obviously avoiding eating school lunch by not eating food at all. Who’s happy if they’re not eating? Besides Ghandi, nobody of importance.

Of course, the anorexics get the easy way out because the rest of us are choking down the food. And then of course the bulimics choke it back up, but you can’t hold that against them because we’ve all wanted to do that after eating school food. They’re just allowing natural survival instinct to kick in. From there, it’s an obvious extrapolation to determine the core of all the unhappiness in the school – the five paragraph essay, something that creates a gag reflex from just hearing it.

You remember those horrid five paragraph essays you always had to write, I’m sure. The ones that start with a beginning and end with a conclusion and somewhere in the middle have 3 provable parts. The whole formula creates a complete and total gag reflex of the mind, which students are quick to mop up into a semi-cohesive mass known as an essay. Rarely, if ever, do the students get a chance to take the assignment and do something useful with it, it’s just, “*gag* blehhh! Here’s your essay Mister So and So.”

The five paragraph essay is the epitome of unhappiness. You may think I exaggerate, but how many kids groan when they hear the teacher saying it? How many teachers groan at home while they’re reading them? How many goth kids groan just because the other kids are unhappy and they need to show them how it’s done? Essays are the bane of high school existence. Or are they?

Perhaps the real bane of high school existence is that nobody wants the essay to be more than it is: sad, pathetic, useless. Essays aren’t the bane of high school existence because writing is hard to do, they’re the bane because they typically represent the stifling environment high school is, a place totally devoid of creativity and, even worse, a place where everything is simply an exercise in futility.

Which, cleverly enough, brings us back to the Calc teacher and sexual innuendo. The real problem I have with high school is that in a calculus class we were told to waste our time writing an essay. Essays aren’t a part of calculus, nor will they ever be, but we were asked to write one nonetheless. Yet when a student – me – challenged that futile assignment and tried to change it into an opportunity for creativity, he was attacked for having thought to break the mold and try something new.

I was shot down for creative writing in a calculus writing assignment that was simply included in the curriculum to earn money for encouraging creative writing skills, imagine that! If it’s not reason enough to hate school because they waste your time with essays that don’t mean anything, it’s got to be enough when they mark you down making those essays mean something.

It has come to my attention that I have not updated my site for a while. I’m terribly sorry about that. I have had a few people mention that (for who knows what reason) they actually like catching the occasional updates I put on this site. I’d be horribly sorry to disappoint, so here comes a fun-filled update for all the masochists who like to view my site regularly.

In case you’re wondering why I’ve been so lax in my postings, it has little to do with college taking up all of my free time and late nights studying. No, that doesn’t come until finals. I’ve been wasting my time on stuff far less exciting than homework and studying.

First off, I’ve decided to start a software project with some friends. It may not turn out to be anything fancy, but I’ve been needing some sort of creative outlet with which to develop my programming skills for a long time. Our project is actually something I’ve been thinking I need to do for a long time. I stumbled upon programming at a fairly early age, you see.

Ever since I was 10 I’ve wanted to make a program that lets the user make fun games without any programming knowledge. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing back then, but I tried to think of all the lines of BASIC I’d have to write. I tried to take in the complexity of it all — every ASCII character I’d need to paint to the screen, every menu I’d have to code. Needless to say, I was blown away at the time. BASIC could never have handled the complexity I wanted to achieve.

But now I’m older, and my tools are better. So I’ve decided it’s time to make a program that people actually care about. These pansy hundred-liners for CS 1321 are starting to bore me. I want a project where I actually have to think and develop. And that’s one major reason I’ve been neglecting this website. I’ve been trying to pull together the project and the tools necessary for it.

However, programming is not the only thing that has got me away from the computer. Unfortunately, as much as some would like to hear it, it’s not a girl either. I’ve just been watching a load of movies lately. I’d review them all if I cared enough, but quite frankly, I don’t. I will however try to summarize how I feel about a few.

Constantine: Great movie. The premise of a man who casts out demons to try to buy his way into heaven may turn you off, perhaps not. It’s pretty cool either way though. I even read a comic book or two to see how they were. It would seem the liberties taken on the story line were broad, but that’s okay. I like the movie more than I cared for the comic books I read.

Donnie Darko: You have not lived a complete life until you have seen this movie. It’s a complete mind job. You’ll probably have to watch it over or ask for help, because the story truly is more complex than most people can get in the first viewing. Heck, I’ll admit it… I didn’t quite get all of the details without some help. It’s just not anything you expect it to be from watching it through the first time.

Butterfly Effect: Another excellent, excellent movie. This one deals with the complexities of time travel paradoxes. Specifically a man who finds out he can change his own past and then experience changes to his present world. The movie was very well done, and the lead actor played his role marvelously.

The Transporter: Pretty good movie. Tons of cool fight scenes and even a decent, though rather loose, plot to hold them together.

Well, I think that about wraps it up. Time to stick my head back down into my Java programming. If nobody hears from me in a week, I’ve probably made a marvelous breakthrough for game designers world-wide.

Over the last two weeks I’ve had the great chance to adjust to college life. I’ve not yet attended wild keg parties or anything of that nature, but I think I’ve experienced enough to say I’m getting this whole thing down. This may or may not apply to every college student, but these are just some things relating to adjusting to life at Georgia Tech and just college at large:

1. The weather. Georgian weather is nothing like Utahn weather. Of course, who would expect it to be? That would be rather boring. Georgia has been, for the most part so far, quite warm and on occasions fairly hot. It’s only rained twice since I got here, so it feels like I’m back in Utah with the drought and all.

The main difference is the humid air. The humidity levels are much higher in Georgia. Now I can’t even feel it, so I’d say I’ve adjusted a fair bit in that regard. If you’ve never felt humid air, it’s hard to describe, it’s somewhat like the air in the bathroom after a hot shower has been running. Everything is just a tad bit wet, but as I’ve mentioned, I can’t even notice that wet feeling I used to have when I walked outside.

2. Dorm Life. Dorm life is an interesting aspect of college. Those of you who are attending college but sticking close to home may not get to experience it, but I think it adds to the whole college feel. Living in your own place with a roommate who hopefully can be your friend as well, staying up late, sharing showers… the whole bit just adds a little twist to the experience. You get to sort of feel that freedom of being away from home all the time, rather than just on campus.

Of course, there are negative aspects, the whole shower issue mentioned above, the people (apparently, I didn’t open my door to see) are pushing each other down the hall as fast as they can in a rolling chair at 1 in the morning, sharing a room, having to do your own laundry… but I’d say those are worth the benefit.

3. Classes. You make your own schedule, and it doesn’t necessarily have to start the same time or finish the same time as everyone else’s, as it did in high school. You also get to choose what goes into your schedule. Though you are restricted a bit toward what you plan on majoring in (provided you’d like to graduate, of course), it’s usually what you want to study anyway.

I for one love going to all these classes and learning new things at a level incomprehensibly higher than that of high school. We’ve already covered more in two weeks in Programming than we did in a year in high school. I enjoy the intellectual stimulation that brings.

4. Classes, con’t (freedom). That freedom I discussed is once again an issue because you don’t have to raise your hand to get a hall pass or any of that nonsense. While we’re on that, how ridiculous is it anyway that in high school they gave us all this crap about preparing us and treating us as adults and then they made us ask and get a special pass to use the freakin’ bathroom? In college you can simply walk out of a class. They don’t mind, for the most part.

Attendance isn’t even required in many of the classes. For a large part, neither is homework, excepting those classes that are on subjects that you can’t really test as well in a final exam (programming, writing). They simply expect that you’ll practice the material as much as you need to to pass the exams. A lot less hand holding.

That’s about all I’ve got to say for now. College life is pretty sweet, though it can be tough at times. Won’t it be horrible when I have to go out into the real world and do something besides the cushy job of learning? I hope it won’t.