The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education

The way in which education (in our case "higher education") ought to be, is a diverse and complicated subject, for inquiry or claim. It is a multifaceted and super-conceived edification of transcendence. Being as such, there is no possible way for me to convey a fully developed concept within this cage of the Globe's pages, without undermining my attempts, and I would no doubt neglect something significant, although it probably is so regardless. But, nevertheless, in this poeticized piece, I will be critiquing current educational practices as they far too often appear to hold in the co-defining conceptions erected of the student-teacher-administrative creative projections, from a very narrow standpoint. Moreover, although I will be making a proposition in the face of academic addictions, not all is of my own original convictions, though I may subscribe, in these cases, I am just a messenger of wisdoms. It is not so much important, nor quite my intention, that I change people's impressions on what ought to be expected of quality education, or what is wrong with our current model, as much as it is that people, at least to start off with, truly feel and earnestly think critically about what education means and what it ought to proliferate in one's life on a micro, macro, and meta scaling.

The issue I will cover is whether many of the American values, narratives, norms, and collective identities' influences are subliminally, if not forthrightly, self-refuting and ultimately degrading to the experience and growth of students, not only in the context of institutional educational practices but also in erudition in-itself. The main areas of concern that this essay will be covering are: first, most schools are run for profit at the expense of education; second, intellectual laziness is disseminated in education through a teachers-students disparity; third, there is a false dualism between the discrimination of importance of career oriented schooling and humanities education; and finally, the ideal of education.

Education is marketed as a product, imbuing commoditized values of success and independence, as a package deal to buy into a job, one with benefits and a blindfold. Net profit and distributed royalties rise with sweatshop pedagogy. While the bottom line is considered the beginning of decision-making in a school of learning, edification will always be replaced with indoctrination. Surrogate teachers and shadow supplies at the bargain price of a stagnant development. People are obscured as resources or faceless consumers, to be tended to to the extent that they can consume or reinvest. The domination of the administration, as a figurehead to the self-consuming social value, and the entitlement they arbitrarily demand, is coercively corrosive in the way of governance toward teacher's practices. Lessons are now administered through an I.V and the instructor is just a panoptic enforcer of approved budget curriculum. Subsequently, through the noise of everything unsaid but expected and the ruse of a business as a school, students are molded into submissive soldiers that guard the ideology that spawned them, perpetuating their own oppression and striving to be promoted to oppressor.

The propaganda that is created in this ideology embodied within the teacher-student relation is the value of indifference to the essence of enlightenment, promoting intellectual laziness as a prerequisite to a misguided meaning of our endeavors. Do we not desire meaning and liveliness expressed, discourse without domination, instead of estranged relationships in our heads? Alas, meaningfulness is a luxury we pay for on our deathbeds, and immediate gratification is best spoon fed on a full belly of lethargy. Our apathy is exaggerated by the powerlessness to engage the absurd and is mirrored by the functional application of our educationalist's desire to escape from the same absurdity of life that enslaves us. We are a teacher-student relationship interdependently co-narrating each other's search for meaning, not independent objects on a hierarchical scale of entitlement. As long as a disparity of the teacher-student false dichotomy exists, creative understanding will be dismissed. Teachers are seen to transfer their pretentious information onto the tabula rasa of the student's docile receptacles, banking dead dogmas, while mechanically validating both of their existences with movement, as if it was creative intelligence. What is transferred is a stagnant evanescence of information without any substance or significance associated with it, and even if it is given definition, the associations are still alien to one another. Performance is based not on the creativity or analysis but on how well one is able to fill the machine, and on the machines part, how submissively it lets itself be filled. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher. The teacher is the subject of the learning process while the pupils are mere objects. Students conform to this method and simultaneously reinforcing the teacher's repression. We are not in school for learning but for proper etiquette within a disciplines culture's mores. Intellectual laziness could ask for no better passengers than docile bodies. Moreover, we as students do nothing to renounce hegemony but more so encourage it for the easy attainment of a passing grade and its implications, and not that of edification for-itself.

Most students only see school as training for a job, but teachers seldom discourage this thought. If asked what you're going to school for, would you not posit a response in the shadow of a career to be bought into indentured-slavery? Too often, becoming a contributing member of the economy is the beginning point of a student's educational decisions. Moreover, the humanities education is written off as a pass time to masturbate to on your days off. Consciousness is the curse of condemned freedom, and endowed are we with the responsibility to the absolute or the absurd, demanding of the gods, dignity be preserved. We need to act as active agents engaged within our realities, and not just passive observers washing over the scenery. The ideal goals of both disciplines are not entirely estranged, but another false dichotomy supporting cultural values misplaced. We're all talk and no action or all action and no talk. To neglect one is to accept none.

We mechanically hum along to the noise of formalities in bad faith, while we long for escape from a self-fulfilling prophecy of oppression veiled in crass success and allusions of marginalized kindness, nevertheless measured by the degradation of others' regrets of self-respect and how green the grass is on the graves we step. This is coercive self-expression of a monotonous split personality's obsessions. Our false double consciousness, through the cross eyes of a dimly enlightened desire for meaningfulness we bought for half price, is the catalyst of our lazy economic domination of fear and our political nausea. Like the snake eating its own tail, we are the mundane product of a perpetuated estrangement of ourselves, as a means to a misguided end, compartmentalizing our exuberance while drilling a void in our heads. The oppressors of the world throughout history have never willingly given up control it has to be demanded. What makes you think that this is any different? What ought to be the point of education behind the veil of ignorance?

The Avant-Garde Philosophers' Society is an SLCC student club whose mission is to promote a genuinely examined life while applying an evolving understanding of the Philosophical Good as active agents engaged with the community.