Education and Sorrow

When I graduated high school, I swore off school. But not education. I continued on my own, as I'd always been a voracious reader. I was "grounded" to my room a lot as a kid and books saved me. Locked in my room, I was out in the universe having adventures, or learning occult knowledge. Things unknown to my contemporaries and my family.

My K-12 years were a misery, getting easier toward the end in high school, even though I worked nights since tenth grade. My ADD certainly made my first nine years of school difficult. Though, in my own way, at my own pace, I could excel. That seldom was allowed to happen. Not unusual for any child, to be sure.

But that had little to do with how our national cookie-cutter, 19th century industrial age school system worked. One that we mostly still have today.

"Assembly line them out to get factory jobs!" Time and resources and not enough teachers meant you do it how you are asked, or you walk. More accurately? You're tossed out. I'm sure ethnic minorities had it worse. I was lucky. I was white, lower middle class. But the lower your economic class was, the worse you had it. Ethnic distinctions or not.

I never knew there was a method. Not until I took "Study Skills" in college. Then things got a bit easier. I saw it listed and thought what a great idea! Why did n't they teach us this in K-12? Apparently, you're just supposed to learn it through osmosis. Well? Some of us didn't. Couldn't.

After the Air Force at twenty-five, I floundered for a while. Until I sunk into being nothing. Though I started to acquire a greater love of life. Shrooms, weed, and LSD aided that sojourn.

One day my older brother talked to me in his backyard, where I was living for a year in his outbuilding, in a loft I had refurbished. I was a minimalist then, but it was a freeing, enjoyable experience. Knowing all the while that I was not living to my potential and had effectively lost all I had gained while in the Service. At least materially. Well, I lost a marriage too. But that was on me, in marrying too young.

My brother convinced me to use my VA benefits. And so I started college. For the fourth time. Though this time being my only real effort toward a degree.

“Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.” Lord Byron

But before I made my decision to start college and get an actual degree of some kind, I decided to take two weeks to ruminate and consider my situation, and my future.

I felt life had been somewhat painful up to that point. Though, I was making the best of it. At least, emotionally. Which was overshadowing my existence at the time. I had trouble finding a job after years in the military where I had great respect and responsibility. People's lives actually depended on me.

Now? No one seemed to want to trust me at all. Other than a few shady jobs I'd had. More than one of which had taken great advantage of me.

Over those two weeks, I considered what a degree, what higher education would offer me. More knowledge? Sure. A sharper mind. Hopefully. A greater understanding of both the world around me and the universe? To be sure.

I was quite aware of how, with greater knowledge, comes greater pain. I was very focused on that for that first week or so, not much interested in renewing my experience of being abused by a school system once again. But there was something I did not know yet about the difference between college and K-12.

During that second week, however, I started to consider how, with greater knowledge, also comes a greater appreciation of things. A better understanding of art, cinema, science, people, and living in general. There was an upside to it.

In the end, I decided I would give education one last try. After all, if I could survive the nonsense the military put me through, I could certainly deal with school of my peers. Though I would be older now, and returning to school after time away. I would have to get back to where I had been nine years ago when I graduated at seventeen. And that was a little unnerving.

Still, there would surely be wine, women, and song. This was not K-12, but an assemblage of adults. Or near adults anyway.

Once I got into college, took the study skills class along with my other first-quarter classes that first year. I settled in. People, other students this time, were different. People were there because... for a change, they actually wanted to be there. They paid to be there. Not like before where most of us wanted to be elsewhere and were working out issues about authority and our parents. Though, to bs sure some still were. But my K-12 years? Or parents did that to us. The government did that to us.

As one prof put it, he loved teaching college because the kids actually wanted to be there. They had made a choice. Most of them, A choice to be there. They wanted to learn.

And that was what I saw in my fellow classmates. It was addictive and invigorating. A bit shocking at first. Others in my classes would join in. It wasn't just the smart girl, speaking up, or the wise-ass clever guy joining in, all as the rest of us just sat there ignorant or annoyed. Or worse, bored.

People joined in the discussions. The learning invoked great attitudes and we all wanted to be there. I too wanted to be there. It was kind of amazing and rewarding, and after a quarter or two of classes, I was fully invested. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn more. But also, the more I learned, the less I knew I knew of the ever-expanding awareness of the vastness of all knowledge. 

This was better than partying all the time or doing drugs. It was also giving me something back for my efforts. Something that would remain with me for the rest of my life.

However, there was indeed a downside. 

Deep into the last part of the Fall quarter in my final year, I wandered into the Career Center at Western Washington University. I thought, maybe they could offer me some help, as soon, I would graduate. And...then what?

I sat with a counselor and explained my situation. She looked at me shocked and said, "You're late." I asked what she meant. I had months until I graduated. I believe, about three left. "See these other students in here?" She said. I looked around. A few students were studiously reading various things and filling out forms. "Yes?" What she said next disturbed and shocked me.

"They've been coming here for months, some for a year already. You should have been here sooner."

And sure enough, she was right. I never did find a job for after graduation. I graduated and moved back home, to Tacoma. And... ended up at the same job I had when I started college, and at the same hourly rate. I was crushed. Happy to have a job. But despondent. 

It was a letdown to be sure. Why didn't ANYONE tell me to prepare for leaving college? Eventually, I transferred up to Seattle to another store with the same company, MTS Incorporated. Tower Records. It was a fun place to work, not much money, and not the potential for advancement.

IF you weren't interested in getting your own store to manage. Which I wasn't. Reason there being, I'd been in retail sales since tenth grade at the Drive-In Theater where I worked nights all through high school. I'd started there cleaning the field the night after shows played. It was back-breaking work for a ninth-grader.

Someone once told me that to make money in life, you can't be the employee who physically touches any of the money made. You have to get away from that. Which surely managing the store would do. But I wanted more, yet.

I tried to get a job in Seattle as a starting psychologist and got hit with the hard reality that I was already getting paid more where I was. I was stunned. It wasn't much more but after money, time, blood, sweat, and tears to get a university degree, I'd make the same money? 

I had found before graduating at the career center at WWU that many students were already volunteering for unpaid jobs. Then later after graduation, many got hired. I couldn't afford to do that any longer now that I was working for a living. I'd blown that opportunity.

When I found that out while still in college, I asked a friend and fellow psych student about that and she said, oh yeah, sure. I've been volunteering with special needs kids for a while now. Years later she was a counselor at a K-12 school. 

And so, I found myself stuck in my job for a while longer.

Eventually, I was able to find my first computer job which began my life in IT work. Which eventually paid very well as I worked my way up. I shocked coworkers on my IT team, all of who had computer science degrees. While I had a degree in psychology. 

Regarding that. You'd be surprised how many skills are similar between understanding people as a psychologist and debugging computers, systems, networks, and programs. I did quite well at it.

But I've gotten off track here.

My original point remains. With greater knowledge comes greater awareness...and greater responsibility.

The same is true in the opposite direction for those who remain uneducated and bluster their way through, wanting to be treated as if they deserve the respect some of us have put so much time and effort into achieving. 

Then they start to talk authoritatively about sophisticated issues. Like medicine, or sociological issues. Or politics. Some to be sure are self-educated and deserve our respect. But they are the few.

Certainly, few, who can do it properly. Which is why higher education and structured learning was developed in the first place. Without it, it's too easier to miss entire areas of relevancy.

Too many think they can and have achieved that proper coverage of knowledge on their own, and surely, as most of us have seen...that is simply not the case. And we all have to suffer them and their ignorance as wisdom. There's one at least on every job in every career who thinks they know more than they do. It is a costly thing for them to be employed, until they are found out, and removed. 

In ending, I'll just say this.

More education is almost always better than less. To assume the opposite is dangerous... and abusive. Abusive to the country, to our fellow citizens and to ourselves, our family, friends, and our loved ones.

Whenever you are faced with a problem, an issue, a concern? Take the time to learn more about it. But also and just as importantly, about the surrounding issues. Even some that seem completely unrelated. Because too often, they are related in unseen, and unforeseen ways. 

Because everything is connected and should be seen that way.

Otherwise one day you find yourself poor in so many ways. You find an unnecessary global pandemic staring you down as you die and you wonder... "How did this happen?"

How? It is because with great knowledge comes greater responsibility and greater sorrow. And if you allow it, greater joy too.

But if you don't handle it properly, you will suffer. And others will suffer. We, will suffer. And we do not appreciate it. Especially if WE did do the work.

  

Just as we're all seeing happen today. All around us. All the internet armchair quarterbacks. Political pundits, not worth their weight in...swamp mud. 

Yet, it does not have to be like this. We CAN handle things right. To see our responsibilities. To act to address them properly. To find our job in life that will give you the best life. 

It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better. It just takes effort. It just doesn't have to be like this. 

It really doesn't. 

Education - America is Waiting

It occurs to me that the issue with conservatives about education is that they have redefined Human Capital to equal zero. Look up the history of America and free education back in the 1800s and see how they talk about human capital.

Back when children worked in factories it was deemed worthy to invest in human capital...in people. Thomas Paine, Horace Mann (I went to a Mann elementary school myself), John Dewey and others spoke out and evoked change. They could see the value of increasing the education of all Americans to the point that we as a nation should invest in it to assure that it happens. We then made it a law that you had to attend school. For a reason.

If we now educate people up beyond literacy, into primary and secondary education (K-12) we could enhance the entire lot of our citizens overall, as well as our nation's status in the world.

Education became free through high school which was originally considered only college prep school. It was made legal that you have to attend to fourteen but your schooling was paid for through the senior (12th) year of high school.

The benefits of these changes were pretty immediate and obvious.

Now college (two or four year, depending) is the equivalent to how high school was back then and for many decades since, until we became an information society. We now need to expand that well established free education from K-12 to K-16. Then we will start to regain our intellectual status worldwide once again.

We will NOT do this by giving all our money and benefits free to the 1% wealthy class. How does that make any sense? How stupid does one have to be to believe in trickledown economics, or to think we'd buy that for very long as we watch everything erode around us including us?

While only a few reap these benefits, they then say that they have and should have everything in being job creators, when it is really the middle class who are. They say that to give back (what they stole, what they got us to legislate for them) is giving freebies to the unwashed masses.

I'd laugh if it wasn't such a travesty.

Corporate thinking means only sure things are worth anything, only profit is worthy of contemplation. That becomes, any expenditure in people per se is a complete waste of profit. Nothing beyond mere surface efforts should be tried. Only superficial efforts for people should be done, and only to shut up their outcries.

Thus conservatives, republicans, the rich elite are against more schooling, against K-16 being free. As i is they have been doing their best to decrease what we have already achieved.

They are against now even K-12 being free.

Let's face it, they are against people. Citizens are an ugly necessity. If and when they can do away with them, with people...we be all gone. Except for those elites. Which won't work, someone has to do the labor. But that is what they want it would seem. A binary nation of those few who have supported by those who do not and are too afraid to do anything about it. Afraid to vote for the candidate who can do, for the one who will kind of do.

Act now. Not, when you are being hustled into prison for speaking out. Not once they have monetized our rights, our water, our air, our privacy, our freedom.

So called "Patriot militias" are a voice, typically yelling about things that are counterproductive to all this because of their slight knowledge of all the wrong things. They are merely a distraction and the rich love them.

What they fear is real action.

People abandoning the rotting carcass of the GOP, the Conservative movement, the religious political movement, all the groups so easily deluded. If they once stop, look around, see what insanity they have been immersed in and leave, then we all win.

But they want to keep people ignorant. Or better, stupid. It is a feather in their cap. When they say free education is impossible all while the rest of the world does it before us, listen to your heart, not the rich, not their politicians disassembling among you.

They are not our friend. They (and you) only think they are.

Next time you drive over a bridge and realize that you may die before you get to the other end, wonder where the money went to maintain it.

When your 18 year old child cannot get a job because you and they cannot afford college for them, ask why.

WAKE UP to reality!

Face slap yourself! Shock your mind. Quit your somnambulance.

Come back out into the world if you've ever even been out here. This has been going on for that long. Cold water on your face now, up into your consciousness.

We're all here waiting for you. The few and slightly aware because that's all it takes, having even a partial realization.

America Is Waiting for some sort of a message or another. Well, here it was.