With consideration to the Education System being the highest form of colonialism we have remaining; it’s no wonder the academics are losing their minds over its potential exposure. Let’s be real about one thing to start with – any person currently residing in the U.S.A. under “legal” status is actively benefiting over the pillaging of a nation on the backs of others. This is non-negotiable and we are each benefiting at least as much as the next. What “made America great” at one point was the legacy of being able to provide a better life for your offspring by means of opportunity through hard work. That and the idea that if you weren’t surrounded by “your people” you could go and find them somewhere. The preservation of free thought accompanied more innovation than the world had previously known. There was this intended ability to move freely in trade and in being amongst this space of shared overall security. What made America not so great was the idea that it was not safe for every person to venture everywhere – frequently on the basis of external appearance and is unfortunately still that way. And the idea that anyone could ever own another person is absurd. However, one could argue we have the assumption of ownership to our youth currently, but messing with that idea might put others responsible for their livelihood so we better leave that one alone for now, I suppose.
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It was reading another’s blog post years back that I first read the suggested idea that the education system has been the longest run experiment on children without being validated. I have argued since that we have enough data to have, in fact, proved it to be invalid. In my research of the application of the education system, it definitely organized through the North Eastern territories first – focused on male learning. As a fourth-generation Midwestern higher educated individual, I have witnessed a deterioration to the Enlightened portion of becoming educated. Much of this can unfortunately be attributed to affirmative action. Instead of investing in the disenfranchised through early education and the availing of opportunities for expansive mind development through enriched cultural experiences, we just changed the acceptance rates – not enlightening. This is just one of the many band-aid policies gone bad through a government that doesn’t relate to its citizens. I come from a Libertarian community with a longstanding heritage for continued investment by its own members. This included through the education system for the longest time. I feel mostly grateful for my early education experiences there, these were that which gathered the final resources which had been availed to my generation X siblings. It was just after one of their graduations that my father saw a need. He approached the principal – who was the same as his own decades prior. He pitched the idea of having every senior in the school take a class called “life” where they should have professional members of the community come in and teach about vital aspects such as taxes, banking, and other required information to be successful in adulthood. He thought this would be a great way to make connections in the community as well. Due to the increasing standardization he was shut down.
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Consider the self-esteem of any person in the graduating class of 2001 or after. In many cases, even those who’ve been successful but are without a college level education remain feeling as though they have fallen short. This can be seen alongside “No Child Left Behind” which cast the seventy-five percent of Americans who fall into the classification of lower than a Bachelor’s level education to think they had failed. It has, not to mention failed to adequately prepare that same group for the requirements it will face to complete this learning. In this way we have seen the U.S. education system be gradually tailored to the needs of the Elite above the rest. This can be seen, in part, through the dismissing of arts programs and other extracurriculars. For how many generations have we seen our youth being challenged by curriculum that far surpassed the complexity by which their parents had learned? In considering the idea posed by Gabor Mate – play being the biological opposite of trauma. I would argue the disintegration of the arts programs through the public school system is linked directly to our societal decline in mental health. People should be learning languages, instruments, and other forms of artistic expression as a creative outlet to experience the world as well as process their life happenings. As it is these extracurriculars are mostly available in the spare time for those same Elite families the entire education has been geared towards. No wonder many who are in the teaching and leadership spaces where decisions are being made are so out of touch with what options lay people have. This is not to mention their assumption that the quality behind any education matched what they themselves had received. As an elder millennial of the rural population I can tell you – we did not. Top that off with them designing our economic system to favour their positions in the world. It is painful to observe people driven by the amount of money they can earn rather than how excellent they may perform.
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“Were the women in your family not pushed to achieve?” This was the question brought to my attention by my coworker towards the close of the 2016 election. It left me in a beyond a deer in the headlights position of reflection for quite some period after hearing it. It occurred after a bout of my bragging of how accomplished my brothers both were. I have always admired them so much. One is a Lawyer, CPA, and Judge, another is a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit Doctor. After hearing this question it did come to mind that I never heard the same tagline for them at the encouragement that they could be whatever they wanted. Which was to remember to find a rich spouse. As a child, my early standardized test scores were better than that of my elder siblings. This is a fact I remember asking my dad to stop airing prior to attending graduate school a few years ago. I told him how embarrassing it was to hear that information with consideration to the comparison of our lives and how pitifully mine had turned out. At that point I had earned my BS in Psychology knowing there’s not a damn thing you can really do with that without a Master’s degree. So, there I was in my $15 /hour substance use intake program, unable to make any student loan payments and in need of furthering my education and a better paying job. For the longest period I was known to say that I never minded being overqualified for a position. As it relates to doing the work – I still don’t. It became a problem when people with more impressive letters than mine spoke to me with such condescension I knew they had never experienced humility. This was directly linked to an astonishingly disappointing level of thought able to be dialogued in my master’s program all while being taught to act from a point of arrogance.
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It was while my husband was listening to a Tim Pool podcast that I picked up on his critique that the United States is not currently producing anything for the rest of the world. This set with me for a period as I was working through my MSW. It was watching the series Madam Secretary where I would put it all together. This was the idea that, in many cases, our nation’s leaders are being educated right alongside the siblings of other world leaders children. This got me reflecting back to the number of international students who I went to school with. Most of whom were intended to return home with the knowledge they’d acquired from the renowned United States higher education system. All of the sudden, poof – we are educating the world, that is what we are producing. This led to my solution for the current student loan conflict in the U.S. through the Tariff of all Tariffs – we need to apply an astronomical level tariff to the tuition of international students – the parents who are paying can afford it and will and then when this surplus becomes more than the student debt owed by current U.S. citizens, they can be forgiven. This would also help us to pay attention to the subjects which foreign nations revere as worth investing knowledge in – I can tell you, I don’t recall meeting a single international student seeking their undergraduate of psychology nor their advanced social work degree along my side.
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The thing about theory is that it is a great way to discuss what has already happened. It is not, however, a practical way of navigating what is going on in real time. As someone with ample life experience compared with my typical undergraduate and graduate level classmate, I had an edge going into both of my programs. This was in part to know how valuable having direct access to these professors was and to be more grateful for the opportunity to be there at all. What I have observed repeatedly at this point in my career has been that longitudinally intuitive, or lived experience does match that of what theory has found and brought to light. The first thing I want to point out is that this is fantastic news. The conflict which has gradually risen and become more pronounced through standardization and the current educational/licensing processes is that all too often those with access to the theoretical knowledge are not the same as those with lived applicable experience. And it takes the latter to connect with the client. Without connection, treatment will fail. At this point in time, we have a massive deficit of qualified providers which has been met with the diluting of material in order to pass individuals through. As I informed the leaders of my MSW program – this is only muddying the waters between actual qualified providers. What I can tell you now, as someone whose high school principal recommendation was to drop out stating “school’s not for everyone”, after all that I’ve accomplished is – he was right. After experiencing a major health emergency that derailed my thoughts for the direction of my career, what I know now is that I never needed nor wanted a higher education. The only thing I ever wanted was to have babies and be a good mom. It was in obtaining these educations that I have failed to achieve my earliest goal. As I am developing a business plan that should be linked to many fulfilling job opportunities to those who’ve felt they were left in the shadows, all I want to ensure I that each person feel dignified in the ability to make a choice about what they do want for their own future without such societal pressures.
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