The children of the privileged are privileged from birth, just as the progeny of the poor are unduly disadvantaged...from the getgo!
The reality of what we call education depends on whether its design is intended to follow the path of the Latin educare, that is, to train (or dress, as one dresses an animal) or educere, which means literally “to lead out,” hence to bring to fruition the hidden potential.
This – and many other aspects of the rather distressing world we live in – derive from the original sin, which is primogeniture. It's how the rich got rich, and richer, and richer. It's what enabled fortunes to exceed all semblance of sanity until, as now, they have become morally bankrupt. It is not merely incidental that today, what the NYT's Krugman might call “the deeply average” can purchase “student experience” (not to be confused with education) and subsequently wield immense industrial power although they haven't an ounce of industriousness or skill and are demonstrably dumb as shit.
How frighteningly sad that ranked universities can buy their rank. How sadly ironic that the privileged actually pay more and more for less and less education.
Business schools follow degenerate business models continually re-baptized to throw the wary off the scent and to justify the endless newspaper columns poured out by ambitious so-called journalists eager to make a decent name for themselves in a very tawdry milieu, brutish, dishonourable business practices that ultimately benefit some miniscule fraction of society and are destined to destroy the planet itself. Hats off to geneticist Dr. David Suzuki who called a spade a spade when he said that conventional economics was a form of brain damage.
May I also salute, in passing, one of the least misogynist philosophers of all time, whose idea of education demanded little more than a library and a garden. Today, much of what you need to learn and know in order to be happy and a decent, caring human being can be found online. So today's epicurean needs a laptop and a park.
Why is education the first substantial post here? Because the first thing to learn is how to learn. And where. And from whom. For example, I don't remember ever reading about any historian described as ”right wing” or “republican” or “conservative” or “capitalist.” How is this possible, seeing as they are all at least one of the aforementioned? Censorship or self-censorship, or both?
Funny – though far from amusing – that when you google Michael Parenti, you learn immediately that he is a left-wing historian. Hmm.
When I say language is everything I mean every letter and syllable! Allow me the shorthand to say that tech/academia – whichis in control of all we think and think we know -- is peopled by an unmistakeably right-wing contingency. The unbraindead will need no further warning: Remember to re-filter the filtered information that surrounds you.
Just as we were all formatted in childhood, it is important to realize that our world-views were systematically shaped by the absence of certain words. Only recently is the American empire (or should we say, the never dissolved Anglo-American empire) described as an empire. Now that the indoctrination has been completed, -- the brainwashing to equate the notions of capitalist and democratic -- it can be admitted that this empire is avowedly capitalist. That equation was effectively built on the absence of the word capitalist. We spoke only of American democracy for most of America's history. . America is a democracy, we were made to believe and ipso facto, capitalism must be democratic. Of course this is pure nonsense. For good or for evil, capitalism cannot coincide with democracy. They are antithetical concepts. Don't think so? Well if there were any democracy 9-5, all workers would take three hours for lunch instead of three-quarters of an hour. America is a weekend democracy: that's when you get to chose mustard or ketchup. In short, almost no one has been “educated.” We've been indoctrinated, led to believe whatever the established Ruling Class wants us to believe – that is, that all's for the best in the best of all possible worlds. QED.
Does anyone seriously want to learn anything? Or do they want only to acquire whatever is needed to earn a higher salary? If you truly want to advance human understanding (including your own!) you will need teachers – people who understand the noble meaning of the word education, who relish those students that the wide world uses for target practice, calling them conspiracy theorists. As Jacob Bronowski put it, “It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is, but to question it.”
I think that if you go to university to ensure a well-paid job, you have wasted both time and money. Go for the education! Form a self that you can be proud of as a scuptor chisels away at a block of granite to produce a work of art.
If on the other hand, you look at this wretched world where automobiles have shelter and children do not, where some have champagne while others lack even clean drinking water, where...is there really any need to go on? If all you dream of is to be top dog, then you are part of the problem. YOU are the disease you wish someone would cure.