As soon as I started kindergarten, I knew I wanted to go to college. That is what boys should want to do, so they can become a man. This knowledge provided great structure to my life. All I needed to focus on was one academic grade at a time.
School was very important, but most of my friends said they hated it. Although they seemed to be having mostly a good time while they were there, it was not cool to say so. It was great fun to go back – to – school shopping, but the best day of my young school days life was the last day of school which marked the beginning of summer vacation and “no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks.”
A boy had better want to go to college, if he wanted to get a good job. Without college a man could easily end up with a crappy job, with no opportunity for advancement and no savings for retirement.
The only way to get into college was to keep passing tests. You needed to pass tests to pass grades because you needed to pass grades to receive a high school diploma and you needed to pass high school to get into college. Early on, I learned the critical importance of paying attention to and learning what might be asked on the test.
I recall one of the early things I learned was that the Earth wasn’t as flat as it appeared to be, but it was round like a ball. I’m pretty sure I learned this before I even went to school. It was knowledge that made me feel grown up and not just a stupid kid anymore.
As I grew, I delighted in being taught things that were not detectable by the unaided senses and the minds of little children. When I first learned things called germs, made you sick it was mind-blowing.
So I paid attention to what might be on the test and got a good deal of satisfaction of learning improbable things along the way. I also learned that First Graders were smarter than kindergartners and those with doctoral degrees smarter than those who just had masters degrees.
I learned that “blue collar” workers were better than “red necks,” that is men who had to work outdoors a great deal, but not as good as college men. About the only job that was greater than those for college-educated men was the soldier. You needed to be brave and strong and able to shoot a rifle, to be a soldier. In school, a boy could learn bravery to avoid getting beat up too many times in school lavatories and playgrounds. You could get quality guidance on how to be strong if you were talented enough to make a scholastic sports team. The rifle shooting you needed to go elsewhere for. My father taught me how to shoot a rifle, but that hurt my ears. I decided that I wasn’t cut out to be a soldier.
College suited me just fine. There was sex, drugs and rock and roll in abundance. There was all manner of recreational activities and it was easy to find a late night poker game. I lived in dormitories and ate in cafeterias. I didn’t need to shop for groceries, cook or do dishes. When the sheets I slept in got a little stiff I could exchange them for a clean set. I went to bed whenever I wanted.
To keep all of this good stuff going I had to pay attention to what might be on a test, to avoid flunking out. This was not always easy to do when sleep deprived from having too much fun or being hung over from too much alcohol to drink.
At college you are exposed to most of the sins known to man, college students quite often learn about sin in college the hard way.
I don’t have many wild and crazy stories I could tell about my time in college because I was rather studious and too fearful to do much of the naughty stuff. The biggest regret I have about college is the time I spent learning the lies that are the main curriculum of every college because I wanted to pass the tests.
It dawned on me early on what was on the tests wasn’t all that went on in the World. I learned that Christopher Columbus was brave to sail towards the what could have been the edge of the Earth, but was not so nice to the people in the lands that he was credited with discovering. How not so nice he was still goes unspoken about much in schools. This is the case about most horrible things and there are many, many, many of these.
So I learned about a scant few of the massive number of biased errors of omission in my education leading up to college. In college I thought I would be freer to learn things that the faculty wasn’t teaching and the very expensive textbooks weren’t mentioning, trouble is there was little time for this and most of the unassigned reading while addressing some omissions also were repeating lies as well.
Often lies were covered by the claim they had scientific support. I was told the lie that science is all about controlling bias in learning. Science is still one of the biggest cover-ups in all of academic lying.
You don’t have to think much to realize that mainstream stream education is taught primarily by the cult of college-educated men. A powerful minority of men in this cult learned about their family roles in perpetuating the lies taught in college, in quasi-secret college clubs such as Yale University’s Skull And Bones organization. Many major universes still have such clubs, although they will claim that they aren’t secret anymore and what you need to do to get into them isn’t as bad as it once was. The two United States Presidents name Bush and the fellow who was defeated by the younger Bush for that position, former Secretary of State, John Kerry, could reminisce about what their experiences were like as member in good standing amongst Skull and Bones alumni, but I don’t think they will do this anytime soon.
Most of the lying in college is done by men who are unwitting victims of the thought control practices that they were imprisoned by in grade school, if not sooner. These practices make a great deal of money for many people. College professors get paid pretty well and have some nice benefits. Grade school teachers don’t do so bad either. Textbook publishers cash in big time. So do the places that rent the ridiculous outfits that students feel honored to put on for graduation ceremonies prior to the parties.
My oldest son put on the square hat and donned the flowing robe for his high school graduation ceremony. He marched in like everybody else. When his name was called for him to go and get his paper, he took a red stocking cap out of a pocket and made a switch of headware. The assistant high school principal did the job that assistant high school principles so often do, he ran after my son and convinced him to comply with what was expected. I just laughed.
I may sound somewhat disrespectful of the hard work of honest academics when I don’t mean to. After all the system has been very good to me. I went on to get a masters degree in social work. That piece of paper I got to prove that was the key to a rewarding career.
Problem is I was but a pawn in a game that distracts human beings from caring deeply about their fellow human beings. I helped people I called patients and clients for a salary, health care benefits and paid time off.
I am just coming to understand this now.
I am reflecting on these things and writing about them only because there is still some money left in my 401K. I can easily scold myself for not thinking too deeply about what I was doing while I was doing it and thinking that I could make up for some of it by writing this now that I am unable to be a social worker anymore.
I rationalize that expressing some of my awareness of what the college-bound education cult did to me, may help others a little. I hope so.
What is newer in education is the internet. The internet is the college educated man’s biggest threat, thus the mocking retort, “What? Oh, did you learn that on the internet?”
Blue Collar Worker and Red Neck mocking aren’t as bad as it once was, as many men in these positions are free of college loan debt and aren’t doing as poorly in comparison to college-educated men, as they once did. At least those fortunate enough to find full-time employment other than by big box stores and fast food service restaurants are doing better.
Mainstream education cult members have new put-downs for men that question the lies being told them. These include, “flat Earth society” nut job, “Hippy Dippy New Ager,” “Tin Hatter,” religious zealot, somebody who has seen too many science fiction movies and thinks that time travel, star wars and reptilian shape-shifting may be other than that and somebody who thinks they are being “Mandella Effected,” are portrayed as being a new kind of stupid.
The vast majority of men who use dismissive stereotypes like these, have done little to no research on their own as to the evidence that the Earth is not a sphere, that things spiritual have any merit, that electromagnetic pulses can be bad for you, or that time travel and other really weird stuff happens outside of science fiction. A few men are getting paid to lie about these matters. A few men laugh and laugh at how little most men know about them.
If you are a man, who has become aware of what the college-bound education has done to you, while it was doing some things that you liked, you might want to write about it. The Good Men Project is a place you can do that. In so doing you might feel a little less pissed off.
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images