B. U. G. S.

This article is part of a series generated by CL giving me hell, making me think, Derek’s having a revelation as a result and my series of replies to all this mental activity.

In the piece below I happened to mention that a person with a degree is immunized from learning anything from anybody WITHOUT a degree.

This graduate seminar is for people who have OUTGROWN their college indoctrination. A college degree is not necessarily a minus — I have one so I can’t cast stones — but you have to prove you can think DESPITE it.

All the log cabin crap aside, I honestly find that the average skilled working man with a good brain starts ahead in the race to qualify here.

At Mensa meetings, I hear, there are a lot of working people. There would be a lot more if working people actually thought of joining, but most of them don’t know that Mensa is and don’t care.

FYI: Mensa is an organization of people who score above 130 on an IQ test. It used to be higher, but that kept the dues payments down.

The fact that there are so many working people in Mensa, despite the fact that very few working people even know it exists, is often mentioned

But absolutely nobody says it might point up some flaw in our education system.

When I was flunking our of high school the teachers were very grateful to me. Each year there were what was something called the National High School Cooperative Exams which we all took. The NHSCE were limited to a few schools, among them Columbia High School which I attended.

The National High School Cooperative Exams compared students in courses nationwide in what they KNEW about the subjects they were studying. Southern teachers always preached the doctrined that Southern education was hopelessly inferior to Northern teaching in general, but they wanted THEIR OWN students to do well on those exams.

I never got less the ninety-fifth percentile in the national rankings of what I knew about the subjects I was taking. I broke nienty-nine percent a number of times. This made my teachers look good to the Northern teachers they worshipped.

My teachers expressed their gratitude to me more than once, which was good of them.

But they kept giving me C’s and D’s in those same courses.

It never OCURRED to them that since I knoew the subject there might be a problem with their grading methods.

I might add that such a thought not only never occurred to them. It never occurred to them that it SHOULD occur to them.

It turned out that the University of South Carolina, because of the number of veterans who had never been to school, had a unique rule. Then as now, South Carolina had the highest percentage of military veterans of any state in the Union.

So if you took the National Comprehensive College Examinations, which are now called the SAT’s, and you scored in the top quarter of the NATIONAL rankings, you could enter the University of South Carolina if you had never SEEN a school before.

TIME magazine had an article back then about a young female dancer who entered our USC at age fourteen.

To repeat, the University of South Carolina was the ONLY college in America that had that loophole, and I am sure it has been closed since.

So, since I was flunking out of high school, that exam was my only recourse. My brother had entered USC at the age of fifteen. If he had gone to summer school he would have been still been fourteen.

I took the exam at age sixteen.

Not only did I make in the top quarter of the national ratings of high school gradautes in the exame, people who were at least two years older than I was, I outdid many of the straight A students.

I know this because when I registered and went to the Dean of Students for his signature, he actually raved about the high level I had scored.

Just as my high school teachers had done.

If I had not been in the benighted state of South Carolina, I would have been one of those people who flunked out of high school and who qualify for Mensa.

So if you DO have a college degree, you are welcome here. But only if you prove you’ve outgrown the damned thing.