January 16, 2009

• The Modern Destruction of Man Part II

  Education

  Education is the most put upon system in our society. It is expected to create miracles and is the last bastion of hope (hope as defined as the Athenians explained in the Melian dialogue) for those of us who have seen and wondered at the epic collapse of the Effort. This does not garner much expectations but for one who is steeped in what they believe to be a terminal nose dive flapping their arms and hoping you can ease the descent is worth the try.

  Man is primarily, supposedly, as a biological creature concerned with his survival in relation to his genome. If this was the case, and we take education to be the primary means in which the Modern Man is able to guard himself and enable himself to be able to do this, then we have forgone this Natural Tenet.

  Let us look into the numbers:

  The report indicated that 14% of adults in the U.S. — 30 million people — are

  estimated to be in the Below Basic Literacy category for prose, and that 5% are

  estimated to be Nonliterate in English. An additional 29% are estimated to be in

  the Basic Literacy category for prose. According to the report, these adults struggle

  to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve their goals,

  and to develop their knowledge and potential; that is, they may be functionally

  illiterate.
  

  This is copied from the 2005 proliteracy update that was studying the Illiteracy rate in America. You do the Math. Even if we take what I think is the wrong headed idea that skills are the only measuring stick that we can use to determine an education, it is important. And, if we are using it as the only measuring stick then we are not even living up to that tenet. We are woefully losing our battle with of any measurement. I read that even college graduates are moderately literate when they tried to have them read three types of novels, common e.g. Nora Roberts, etc, moderate e.g. Moby Dick, difficult e.g. Finnegans Wake-and that a large minority could not extrapolate the ideas in the common, and a large majority couldn't identify the themes of Moby Dick, and almost none could do it for Finnegans Wake. And these are supposed to be our educated.

  When, in Illiterate America, Jonathan Kozol notes that car companies did not build factories in the American South despite large concessions, and instead built in Canada because their previous factories in the South went massively over cost because of the illiteracy of the employees, he notes that the Military had to make cartoons, pictorgraphs for the mechanics of helicopters because they couldn't read to a sufficient enough level to decipher the manuals.

  Then, even in this massive failure of even our 'best': those that go to college, then what of those that are not the: best. Again, Jonathan Kozol in his painful, powerful book Savage Inequalities we see schools in East St. Louis where the sewage main broke and shit and piss cascaded into the playground. The School District couldn't afford the clean up so they sprayed grass seeds on it. The grass grew into a waving, undulating, defacto cess pool-Herbert Kohl tells of schools he taught in, in New York that had holes in the roof and rain cascaded into the school rooms, I have read and seen schools that have the same-whose student population is 99% black and they have the audacity to call it 'diverse'-schools whose buildings are collapsing, nurses are not there, whose teachers are woefully burnt out, or mean and indifferent, or are so overwhelmed they, despite their diligent and valiant efforts, are drowning in a sea of Human suffering that they are little equipped to handle. They have to write on paper the teacher buys with their meager pay, they have text books that are old and outdated (I once saw in the early nineties a school that had a World History textbook that was written in and published in the late sixties) These schools get 'educational' mandates, mandatory curriculum-I saw one where each student had to sit silently in rows, and when one got out of line the teacher silently raised his arms and proceeded with a motion that looked dangerously like a 'hail hitler'-the students mimicked this action until all of them did and the room was silent-scary. I work at a site that is not decrepid but we are in the top 2% of the nation for graduation, college entrance, etc. But, still, our staff have taken pay cuts three of the last five years to keep the doors open-we are constantly in financial trouble despite our rising enrollment (we are an alternative program that serves students kicked out, shoved out, or dropped out of school) we still have this issue.

  These children will not survive in any real term of the word without an modicum of an education. Also, the same argument can be made to the selfish chant, "screw 'em they aren't may children" because they will be directly linked to your success. These are the one's that, without help, rob you, steal from you, beat you, hold you up, kill you (most likely themselves as they usually do this-poverty kills poverty but in small clashes and flashes with the upper crust the great fear of the middle class/rich-occurs) they will be the one's destroying your aesthetic by lounging in the doorways of your favorite stores, pissing on your doorstep, defecating in your mailbox-stealing your identity, etc. When we forget the least among us, it is not just a moral failure, it is a pragmatic failure-almost all of the social services, all of the jails (70% of our county budget here in my town), all of the indigent health care e.g. emergency room treatments, are in effect spores of this poverty of mind and body.

  If we say "fuck them, lets pull out all these programs so I can keep my money"-then I point to the Anasazi Indians that mysteriously, supposedly, disappeared from the American South West. But, it is believed, was an outcome of environmental collapse. And, there were some that escaped to the high cliffs that have become so common on postcards and documentaries. There were others too that tried to hide atop mesas and keep the walls high so that the roving bands of starving, crazed, and desperate people would be kept out. Nature tells us, if nothing else, that desperation and starvation knows know barriers-that if you erect them they will find a way: this is nature, not neat and tidy, but driven by death and starvation. An 'oasis' of Anasazi on the mesas who were trying to live quietly and to themselves was discovered by an anthropologist not long ago. It had been overrun by another group that was believed to be one of these roving bands, they had ransacked the town, looted it, ate everything, even the inhabitants of the town-yes, they cannibalized those that tried to erect a barrier between them and the starving. This happens over and over again, unless you can kill every single one of them, and nature says that when people starve because of dearth, they are the massive Mob-and when you have a Massive Mob-then you are the frail minority despite your favored position.

  Through the neglect of our schools, through the absolute inability for it to actually enact a real education that helps construct structures that give meaning, purpose, and insight in to life-we have arisen a culture of massive ignorance. The rich are no less ignorant yet they have yet to pay for the cost of their ignorance (but the Anasazi example gives insight to what will happen) but the poor have always and are still to an ever increasing amount-povety rates have gone up to 12.7%, Child Poverty from 16-17.8% in America (which is a ridiculous number because they label anything under 21,000$ for a family of 4 as poverty-if you make 22,000 you are not considered in poverty). We see this group pays disproportionably in the lack of education (even just skills set type), health care, or any ability to pull themselves out of this poverty.

  This is blatantly against the maxim of survivorship in our species. We are so caught up in the individual, daily, selfish desires that arise with unawareness-it arises here because when we are unaware we partake of our habits, and Man is a creature of close relationships and small tribal mind. We cannot, without conscious effort, think of this-but if we do not we will literally or figuratively or both, be cannibalized by our conscious ignorance.

  Thus, we must define an education. We must understand that it is a not only a moral calling but one of survival. We have to believe this in order for us to act accordingly for what we are currently doing is not working; it has left a vast wasteland in our country that is literal in our poverty stricken neighborhoods, and figurative in the vast wastelands of morality, duty, and thought in our rich neighborhoods. Both of these are wastelands. Fractured psyches that see themselves as islands without understanding the interlocking nature of all things, of ecology, that we live not in a barriered community but that we are all a community even if we do not posit higher callings such as god's children et al. It is a scientific fact that all the variables within a system have an effect on the system, chaos theory, but also, on a more illustrative example-that the health of all our citizens has a direct effect on all of us; that we can leave it be, like a festering wound, but eventually the staph, bacteria, infection reaches critical areas to us, and we are here. We have passed it. I am sure.

  I think we are, to be honest, and many if not all of you do not know me and thus I can be honest, I think we have passed the time of reckoning and we are existing in a state of free fall. That the starving masses are at the doorsteps with their stomachs rumbling yet they have yet to know that they are starving. The trick of our modernity is that instead of letting the poor starve we marketed to them plenty of food, access to it, but no nourishment-we sold them a tale of self reliance through media and they bought it, and we undereducated them, but as long as we all were amused it was okay-but I promise you that no matter how rude the beast it is not amused when its stomach is demanding. We have not yet reached this critical mass here, but it is coming. If we use the statistics that scientists love; increased drop out rates for the lowest socioeconomic groups (up to 60% here in my neck of the woods), lowered real wages, less jobs, more violence, etc. We see it coming. The Great Wave-is what I imagine it,

  when 80% of the world's humanity lives on less than 10$ a day, it is not just a localized problem. When there are 2.2 billion children in the world and 1 billion lives in poverty, when 72 million of developing world's children are not in school-57% girls, then how do we teach that population control is good? Rational thought demands an education, a print rich education (while 48% of Americans are functionally illiterate)-but nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their name.

  Perhaps I am Chicken Little but Chicken Little is going to be right some time-it seems like a wave to me, huge and menacing, and the only thing I believe left to do is to live your life as upright as possible and die with as much dignity as possible. To rend flesh and mind in the quest to live up to your humanity, your duty, your moral calling-and yet, we cannot even do this in our fractured, technological fetish culture that believes all can be solved by the ever more efficient technology-yet they never ask-how can we believe in a structure that makes man subservient to it: as a favorite cog, but never, in itself, has any humanistic idealogy except that of our worst: progress for the only purpose of progress e.g. selfishness-the never ending dark pit. We cannot expect something to produce something that is not in it, it is not-thus looking to technology to solve the woes of man; education, poverty, health-is in essence, futile. It is Man that can do this-but what happens when Man is no longer? When man is an appendage to technology? When God is Dead and he is used as a an empty scaffold that puts in its place the ever increasing adherence, zealot like adherence, to technology: when teachers think Television can teach, the internet is education, that the classroom is a dramatic play-then, we are no longer Human's but parasitic cogs sucking on the teat of technology, consuming the milk of amusement: and we have lost even our biological drive to survive
  tickled to death, tickle torture.

  Let them eat of me both literally and figuratively-it is all I have left: feast on it you zombie bastards and I will weep for what you have lost.

  Be well
  G

  • 1:08 pm
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