An Education
like all average white boys, i went to school at the proper age of 6. so started my adventure in the education industrial complex. when i reached 5th grade the first shift in the system happened. a new roaster of teachers. they told me that everything i have learned so far was shit and had the sole purpose to keep me occupied. the real stuff starts now. then i reached 9th grade. lyceum. those teachers seemed like drill sergeants compared to my previous ones. and they told me the same thing: what you have learned so far is shit. as in not even true. as in we are taking everything from the start. in four years i made it from zero to hero once again. by the time i entered a university i knew the drill. back to the drawing board. everything i learned was shit and i must make amends for my past teachers sins. then i finished my school years. i got out into the world. and the world looked me in the eyes and said: school taught you shit. most things you learned are quite useless if not wrong. so suck it up and start picking up the clues.
basically my educational system had a four year curricula that was explained four times, each times in a more dense, yet different version. all these years i loved learning and hated school at the same time. i was determined to take mark twain’s word through and through.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. -Mark Twain
in time, i grew a very healthy distrust towards school. one of my biggest issue was that i found more and more discrepancies or obsolete content. the school system i attended had a science driven curricula and concept. none of that liberal arts, creative writing bullshit. the real stuff. we were supposed to learn the facts. but then i often got home, opened a book, the internet later, and what i was taught in the classroom proved to be at least erroneous. and this is my conceptual and biggest rift: why school education is not synchronized with facts, science, arts and the fucking world in general. why?!
school, this huge tablet of content should synchronize itself from time to time, let us say, once every two, three years with the world. truth.
now, there are two major types of desynchronization. first one is the actual information standard. there is only one fact to an issue. granted, many issues are controversial, or don’t yet have an answer. but those that do, only have one that is correct. if the capital of a city is changed, all textbooks should fucking change it. since 2006 montenegro is a country, fact. stuff like this. there’s no controversy here. and if there should be one, then you ideally teach both sides, or at least acknowledge the presence of a controversy. the second type is the habit desynchronization. this is a more profound process. we somehow learn the wrong way. the more important skills of rationalizing, determining accurately modern contexts, how we make decisions, prioritizing develop under certain habits. the way we learn usually derives from what we learn every system is adapt to it’s own ends. we still learn in the learning habits of the renaissance. and it’s wrong.
i’ve put together a list of the must mind blowing mistakes people i met got from their school, and the ones i spent the most amount of time in conversations, debates and fights, trying to appropriate the correct term, fact, habit or understanding. so, this is a bias list, but you will find some pretty general stuff here.
the Gall-Peters projection. if you’ve seen a big block of cheese episode in the west wing you already know that the map of the world we learned on and look at day by day is proved to be wrong. this would be a more accurate map:
Columbus wasn’t a nice man. he didn’t discover america, the vikings did. truth. and after he reached his new-found-land he orchestrated and took part in one of the largest genocides ever discovered of native americans. one of the books that brought this into mainstream attention made quite a scandal in it’s day. if you’ve seen sopranos you know that he beat up his son’s history teacher on columbus day because of this book.
Chapter 1, “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress” covers early Native American civilization in North America and the Bahamas, the genocide and enslavement committed by the crew of Christopher Columbus, and incidents of violent colonization by early settlers. Topics include the Arawaks, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Aztecs,Hernán Cortés, Pizarro, Powhatan, the Pequot, the Narragansett, Metacom, King Philip’s War, and the Iroquois.
one of the biggest educational biases are the continents. in russia you will learn that europe and asia are eurasia, one big continent. western europe, on the contrary. south america states that america is one big continent. anyway, most countries accept that there are 7 continents. be part of the debate.
you can’t see the chinese wall from space. the north star isn’t the brightest star and moss doesn’t indicate north. edison did not invent the light bulb, he patented it, just like he patented many many other things, including the 24 frame per second system for movie projections. there are not 9 planets in our solar system. there are either 8 or 13, that is if you count the dwarf planets. socialism is not communism. and in the us liberals are democrats and leftist and republicans are the right political wing.
somehow the fierce resistance of the educational industrial complex to rectify this synchronization proves a pathological fear of being wrong. they somehow believe they are responsible only of the actual teaching not also what they teach. and this fear of being wrong is transmitted in thousand and thousands of classroom. we learn obedience instead of questioning things.
luckily, i went to film school, where they didn’t even give a fuck if i knew the first law of physics. it seemed obvious that an education is something a film director can live without. not only that, but if one would use his knowledge on screen he’s a showoff elitist. some kind of a liberal. well, i’ll leave you with this family guy conversation, because yes, i learned everything i know from the tv.
Brian: “Look, Stewie, you’re putting me in a heck of a position, but I have no choice. You’re not going to kill Santa Claus because…he doesn’t exist.”
Stewie: “Oh, interesting theory, Brian. What’s next? You’re going to tell me that Elmo’s not real? Huh? What about SpongeBob? Is he not real, Brian? Is SpongeBob not there at the bottom of the ocean giving Squidward the business, hmm? And what about Curious George? Is Curious George not really making hats out of newspapers that he should be delivering? Educate yourself, dumb fuck!”