Education Revelation

Gosh... I never meant to "scare the bejeezus" out of a prefrosh days before camp Yale with my anti Ivy-Mythology rant. Sorry kid- you're gunna be fine.

I want to clarify something- Yale got the brunt of my ire because of what I feel is an undeserved overly-lofty status in the collective cultural conscious, and because it's the only college I went to so therefore the only one I know enough about to write long whining diatribes, and because I fancy myself an Ivyconoclast. But Yale isn't hell, or else I would have left.

Yale is simply a symptom of a larger educational epidemic...

The roots of compulsory and linearly ranked (graded) education are sordid and surprising, and I wanted to share some of my research:

In the early 1800s the King of Prussia decided he wanted a KICK ASS army. The kind of army that would do and believe whatever the hell they were told no matter how absurd. So he sent guys with guns to steal kids from their parents and forced them to go to the first official nationalized public school, where they were completely indoctrinated, lectured with unflinchingly rigid royally-approved curriculum, and were not allowed to even ask a question unless they first asked if they had permission to ask a question. This is the origin of raising your hand folks. (...I always knew that prissy bitch Ms. Cook was a fascist...)

Then the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION in America comes along, and Horace Mann, the father of compulsory American public schooling, takes a trip over to Germany to study this tip top child-molding system. He brings it back to make sure there are sufficient cogs for the new American Industrial machine. Check out this creeptastic quote about his goals for indoctrinating, I mean educating, the masses:

"Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron; but children are wax. Strength expended upon the latter may be effectual, which would make no impression upon the former."

Public education was made compulsory on a national level, but its private investors and most influential molders like Ford Rockefeller and Carnegie were never intending to help kids achieve the American Dream. These guys needed bodies to work in factories. John D. Rockefeller, THE FOUNDER OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, said "I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers."

Traditional education was always intended to suppress individual creativity in favor of the collective good. And I'm pretty sure that's called socialism. 

But even after the Robber Barons kicked the bucket, this anti-child agenda held fast. Benjamin Bloom of the famed 'Bloom's Taxonomy,' which has arguably played a bigger role in shaping education than any other document, claimed outright that “The purpose of education is to change the thoughts feelings and actions of students.”

And there, in a nutshell, is the history of why you should be suspicious of traditional education.

But that isn't even close to the most interesting part. THIS is the BEST part:

In order to inspire obedience and competition amongst students, and to save time and money, holistic written evaluations were scrapped in favor of linearly ranked evaluation.  And those impersonal, maddeningly un-calibrated and mind-numbing grades, 4.0, ABCD, grades...WERE INVENTED AT YALE.

Grades. Came. From Yale.

http://books.google.com/books?id=R1QH0db2xGsC&pg=PA4&dq=%22It+was+not+until+1785+that+an+american+college%22&ei=8PK1SOb7ApW0yQSN6fTLAQ&sig=ACfU3U2ltFA7HC8x_r2-OjiaN9gO5IFLXg

(Not to be outdone, Harvard decides to use 100 points instead of four...)

Of course in order to impress these institutions, all the feeder schools began shaping their evaluation system to comply with these rankings. Grades trickled down from Yale to thousands of highschools and middleschools and beyond, tantalizing and torturing the brains of millions of kids for the past hundred years with their uncreative unproductive and unhelpful brand of labeling.

Holy Shit. When I first read this I fell off my couch and lay there basking in the horrifying possibility that I was a pawn in some sick cosmic cycle of elitism... I had spent 16 years perfecting a system to impress the very institution which invented the system?! WHAAAT?

I was horrified. I was furious. I was shocked that I hadn't looked into this sooner... everyone just follows the system without stopping to question its merits or relevance. Nobody tells you that the whole damn thing was concocted as a way to bludgeon your individuality to death with a cleaver and then pump your deflated corpse full of creamy sweet conformist filling.

But then after my blood boiled over I started to feel vindicated for having suspected something was fishy since the very beginning... school was a drag. I was good at it but it never made my soul sing, and I was sure there was more to life than being a good parrot. I was proud of myself for never giving in. And I decided to spread the word.

Consider it spread. 

Several very insightful commenters noted that if you try hard you can find inspiring teachers and great people at Yale, and they are absolutely totally right. In fact that's true of most places you'll find yourself educational or no.

But it just seems to me that for all the hype, for all the bullshit of applying, for all the time and for 40 grand a year for four years, your brain should be orgasmically stimulated. Call me a demanding customer, but that's the way I see it.

College is a product without a better business bureau to police it, and the most infuriating thing is that even if you don't want to buy it, it has made itself a necessity in many job circles. And with inflation, the jobs that used to go to college grads now require masters degrees, and the MA positions are only PH.D worthy, etc.

So work the system and get the most you can, but know that it's just that, a system, not an answer.

Be an Autodidact. Follow your passions. Thoughts?

Best,

HnnH

(Cuz you can take the 'A's and shove them up your SS.)