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.

I’ve currently got my iPod shuffle filled with Overclocked Remix music. www.ocremix.org is a place where you can download (or contribute to) a collection of nearly 1500 video game tracks, remixed. There’s all the classics: Sonic, Tetris, Mario… all there. People take the original game tracks and totally revamp them. It’s some pretty good stuff.

Anyway, drop them onto a CD/MP3 player and you have yourself your very own video game music. If you listen to the music and try to visualize it, you can feel like you’re in a video game. Seriously.

I came across this realization while I got on the bus this morning and the track suddenly changed to this perfect traveling music. I could suddenly visualize a top-down view focusing on the bus as it zoomed me along to it’s destination, as if it were an old game of Final Fantasy. 8 bit graphics, everything. I could see it. I couldn’t help but smile in my nerdery.

The amazing effect this background music brings is amplified by the fact that you can take it with you. I highly recommend the iPod shuffle. It fits so nicely in the pocket. Then, whenever you’re taking a short jaunt across campus, you can reach into your pocket and have instant entertainment. Video games are always more fun than life. Just imagine you’re moving your character around in one of those RPGs. With the right songs playing it works so well.

Remember that scene in the Matrix where Neo finds out that he’s in the Matrix, and then they get him out of the Matrix? The one that pretty much ends with Morpheus saying “Welcome to the real world”? That’s the point we are at in my life now. Not saying I’ll now be jumping buildings in a single bound or learning to fly, but the basic idea is still there.

High School, my friends, is like the Matrix. You may not see the parallel, you may not of seen the movie (shame on you), but the truth of it isn’t lessened anyway. I’m going to show some examples to help you see my analogy:

——
*Interrogation Scene*

COUNSELOR THOMAS
As you can see, we’ve had our eye on
you for some time now, Mr. Haslem.

She opens the file. Paper rattle marks the silence as he
flips several pages. David cannot tell if she is looking at
the file or at him.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
It seems that you have been living
two lives. In one life, you are
David Haslem, student at Cyprus High.
You take go to class, you’re rarely tardy
and you even help Mr. Child teach his
dumber students.

The pages continue to turn.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
The other life is lived at home
where you search google for scientific
articles, research topics on Wikipedia,
and even read books —
learning, as it were…

DAVE feels himself sinking.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
One of these lives has a future.
One of them does not.

She closes the file.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
I’m going to be as forthcoming as I
can be, Mr. Haslem. You are here
because you need our help.

She removes her glasses, her eyes are unnatural ice-
blue.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
We know that you have been thinking
of trying to get out of the state for
college.

She leans closer.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
My colleagues believe that I am
wasting my time with you but I
believe you want to do the right
thing. It is obvious that you are
an intelligent man, Mr. Haslem,
and that you are interested in the
future. That is why I believe you
are ready to put your intelligence
behind you and get on with your
life.

DAVE stares to match her stare.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
We are willing to help you get into
SLCC, to give you a fresh start and
all we are asking in return is your
that you don’t try to apply to any
of these big-wig colleges like MIT
or Georgia Tech.

DAVE nods to himself.

DAVE
Yeah. Wow. That sounds like a real
good deal. But I think I have a
better one. How about I give you
the finger –

He doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t even mention giving a
finger. But he thinks it, and that satisfies him.

DAVE
And would you please send my transcripts
to the schools requested?

COUNSELOR THOMAS puts her glasses back on.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
You disappoint me, Mr. Haslem. Think of
all the money you could save your parents
by going to SLCC.

DAVE
You can’t scare me with monetary logic
crap. I know my rights. I want my
transcripts!

COUNSELOR THOMAS smiles.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
And tell me, Mr. Haslem, what good
is a transcript if you are unable to
get into the college?

The question unnerves DAVE and strangely he begins to feel
his world closing in around him.

DAVE feels his brain grow soft and sticky as it slowly
goes over the possibilities. What if he couldn’t get out?

Wild with fear, he lunges for the door but the counselors
restrain him, holding him in the chair.

COUNSELOR THOMAS
We are going to help you, Mr.
Haslem, whether you want us to or
not.

——

More or less, this describes my meeting with my counselor when I said I wanted to go out-of-state for college. Sure, the counselors didn’t restrain me, but she sure as heck was trying to convince me of the value of staying in-state.

——
* Pick a pill *

TIFF
Let me tell you why you are here.
You have come because you know
something. What you know you can’t
explain but you feel it. You’ve
felt it your whole life, felt that
something is wrong with the world.
You don’t know what, but it’s there
like a splinter in your mind,
driving you mad. It is this feeling
that brought you to me. Do you know
what I’m talking about?

DAVE
High School?

TIFF
Do you want to know what it is?

DAVE swallows hard and nods.

TIFF
High Schools are everywhere, they’re all
around us, here even in this town.
You can see it out your window or on
your television. You feel it when
you go to work, or go to church or
pay your taxes. It is the system
that has been pulled over your eyes
to blind you from the truth.

DAVE
What truth?

TIFF
That you are a slave, DAVE. Like
every other student, you were born into
bondage, kept inside a prison that tells
you when to think, when to learn,
even when to go to the bathroom.
A prison for your mind.

The COUCH CREAKS as she leans back.

TIFF
Unfortunately, no one can be told
what horror High School is. You have
to see it for yourself.

TIFF opens her hands. In the right is a college application. In
the left, a piece of chocolate.

TIFF
This is your last chance. After
this, there is no going back. You
take the chocolate and the story
ends. You wake in your bed and you
believe whatever you want to
believe.

The pills in her open hands are reflected in the glasses.

TIFF
You fill out the college application,
and you’ll be able to see how deep the
rabbit hole goes.

TIFF
Remember that all I am offering is
a good education. Nothing more.

DAVE opens his mouth and takes the chocolate.

TIFF
Follow me.

TIFF
The chocolate you took is part of a trace
program. It’s designed to disrupt
your input/output carrier signal so
we can pinpoint your location.

DAVE
What does that mean?

MIKE (yelling from couch)
Nobody knows what the hell she’s talking
about. You should just fill out the college
application and get her out of your hair.

—–

Dramatized just a tad, this is basically how it is… High School is a prison for the mind. Think about it. You are, for the most part, told what classes you can take. You’re told how you should do assignments and hardly ever expected to learn anything above passing a test. You’re even told when you can go to the bathroom. Interestingly enough, a look in history will show that the modern school system was developed for juvenile detention originally. Enough on that point though.

—–

* Flush *

The pipe is a waste disposal system and DAVE exits, along
with the clot of of other graduated students.

Flushing UP and out he comes into the real world as a high
school graduate.

DAVE begins to drown when he is suddenly snatched from the
flow of waste by his aunts and grandmother.

The car door opens and drops the half-conscious DAVE
onto the floor. Human hands and arms help him up as he
finds himself looking straight at TIFF.

She smiles.

TIFF
Welcome to the real world, DAVE.

He passes out.

FADE TO BLACK.

FADE IN:

INT. DORM ROOM

We have no sense of time. We hear voices whispering.

DAVE (O.S.)
We found it, DAD. We finally
found it.

GRANDMA (O.S.)
What if this isn’t the One, DAVE?
How can you be so sure?

DAVE (O.S.)
The key fits the door to this room.

DAVE’S POV

DAVE’s eyes FLUTTER OPEN. We hear the alarm clock.

DAVE (O.S.)
… am I dead?

ROOMMATE
Far from it.

FADE TO BLACK.

FADE IN:

DAVE

He opens his eyes again, something tingling through him.
He focuses and feels his brain pierced with dozens of
acupuncture-like needles.

PROFESSOR
He needs a lot of work.

TA
I know.

PROFESSOR and TA are teaching DAVE.

DAVE
What are you doing?

TA
Your brain has atrophied. We’re
rebuilding it.

DAVE
Why does my head hurt?

TA
You’ve never used it before.

—–

Yeah. College is quite a different experience from that of High School. For the first time I walk into a classroom expecting to learn something. That’s not something that happens often in High School. I guess that’s probably enough ruining of the Matrix script for one day though, so I’ll close with a final point – it’s nice being out of the Matrix.