ME First
I enjoyed this ramble, so I hope you will.
I did change one word relating to sex. It’s not that I’m prudish, it’s just that I’m supposed to be teaching here, and I don’t KNOW enough about sex for that.
Now I’ll let Dave rave on:
I was at seminar the other day when the speaker’s credentials were recited: She had a PHD in Law, a Masters in Taxation, held a CPA license and was an active member of the California bar. Everybody immediately knew there was something wrong with her. You could almost hear the groaning in the audience. She had that vicious look most serious academics get, like she never had any sex in her life ever and had no hope of getting any ever.
Having to listen to such a woman is almost like being 5 years old and being forced to sit in the pews with a suit on. The only thing you can do is sit there and dream about lobbing spit balls off the pastor’s noggin.
But my favorite in America’s credentialing system is listening to the announcers recite the credentials of colored ball players, the best one being, “a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from State U”.
I have never heard an announcer follow up by saying, “Why didn’t they just let the poor nigger play ball?”
Do you have any idea how humiliating and hard it is to have to sit through two years of lectures by sociology professors, sufficient to enable you to get the 45 quarterly hours of distribution credits to enable you to apply for a college bachelor’s degree? It’s hard on the pride man, if only for the pure waste it involves.
But it is even worse because the whole experience lasts so long and does something to your brain, crippling your ability to think and giving you no hope you will ever recover. You have to have a pretty serious sports injury to be as badly injured, speaking for the long term. Then they tag that Sociology Degree to your ass and you can never get rid of it. It stays for life. They will even mention it in your obituary.
And what a punishment that is for being unable to learn algebra! Why do white people put all those damn X’s and Y’s there anyway? I mean, if that is the thing that’s got to get answered, that thing those X’s and Y’s are supposed to stand for, just ask the question! Why jumble it all up and make it confusing?
White people are just plain crazy, that’s all there is to it.
And being white, I will volunteer.
#1 by shari on 01/08/2008 - 2:07 pm
I wish I had a masters degree in taxation.
#2 by shari on 01/08/2008 - 2:15 pm
My daughter works under such a hardened professional woman. I think she’s on her fourth husband, no kids. Sex they can get, it’s love that they can’t. It takes it’s toll.
#3 by AFKAN on 01/08/2008 - 6:26 pm
The economics that sustains such artificial structures is going away faster than they dared dream.
In an earlier post, Dave made the point that most public educational institutions failed miserably in their intent.
A new way is being developed around this.
See http://wcbstv.com/local/online.high.school.2.619184.html
I suspect the REAL reasons they have developed this are:
(1) The Administrators are tired of trying to turn jungle savages into human beings, which they have to do while going through the State-mandated process of public education.
(2) The Politicians told the Administrators they had to start doing a lot better with the money they have. The idea that Toyota chose to build cars in Canada because they could not trust the Americans to understand pictographs went through a lot of State Boards of Education. All of the “tax incentives” won’t matter if uneducable, and untrainable, illiterates comprise any part of your work force.
This means a System that is essentially self-directed, where those who wish can self-selected out of sitting in a classroom of marginal students, whose chances for advancement are blocked by their lesser-abilitied brethren.
(3) So much money is going into No Child Left Behind, Special Education and ESOL courses that the teachers have no money – or time – for developing excellent studnets, and have become little more than day care workers, and the good teachers have had it.
(4) THAT takes us to the Credentialing Games.
Incessant refinement of the credentialing systems have led to the destruction of the value created by credentialing. For instance, Librarians from the County Library could not get jobs as Librarians in a local high school; that required education credentials…
People can no longer afford the luxury of such systems.
Thus, look for the Internet schools to (1) replace demand for new, and expensive, public school housing at the margins, while (2) acting as an educational tool for the extremes – the best students, who will take to it like cats to cream, and the worst students, who will be removed from the public school environment where, frankly, they never belonged to begin with.
More to follow…
#4 by Dave on 01/10/2008 - 1:47 pm
AFKAN,
You are absolutely right. The mobs of adults that show up to GED classes are shocking. It is just overwhelming and it lets you know about the structure of real controls in America.
The blacks and Mexicans and poor whites don’t graduate from high school. In fact, they are either working in underground jobs and/or are performing servant tasks and/or are in the drug scene and/or are struggling to eat and find shelter.
The GED classes are a secondary credentialing process enabling these people to “go legitimate” for access to the military and/or usually low wage jobs in retail, fast food, nursing home aids, ect.
You are absolutely right too about the Internet “working both ends”. The GED secondary process is a safety valve furnishing a promise of upward mobility, Community College, etc.
It all works as long the economic is strong. The Clinton’s are politically very jacked in to this environment.
But this all looking very “19th century” to me. The simple truth is that high school is an apparatus of oppression for the non-affluent regardless of race. That is because public high school reflects a larger environment of embedded poverty weighted to the dark skinned more than whites, but whites are very much a part of the poverty picture too. At least the public employee union teachers have access to quality protein and a pretense of middle class status, sort of the same way jailers have it.
Meanwhile, the larger enforcement system is trying to keep a lid on the violence, an endemic facet of poverty and racial resentment.
Hence, the lock downs, guards, and metal detectors.
I have great faith in the durability of this system, which is becoming very “South American”. The “controls” (e.g. mechanisms of tyranny) are quite effective. If that were not true, we would not be having such a “show” of mobs through the GED window.
It all adds up to new forms of slavery. Just think of pecking order within the public employee unions themselves. When you belong to a public employee union, you get your “communist party card” and you are better off than those without a “ communist party card”. But there is a pecking order: Teachers, jailers, and local police at the bottom; environmental scientists, military contractor engineers, and FBI and intelligence agency personnel at the top.
There are a whole bunch of financial industry types, consultants, lawyers, and doctors feeding off this system quite nicely, the “upward mobility” tickets that many of the GED’ers are dreaming of, completely unaware of the huge cost of these credentials and licenses. These brands of pilot fish are very admired by the poor, especially poor nonwhites. The GED’ers have no notion of the onerous examination based and university degree “exclusion filters” that are related to these “tickets” to affluence and respectability, let along the cost.
Accordingly, the admiration of white institutions by nonwhites is growing exponentially.
For example, can you imagine the pandemonium that would result if Prince Harry showed his ass in LA?
We would have a million screaming Mexicans and blacks trampling each other for the mere chance of a glimpse of the red haired god.