Don't Stay in School: Part One, A Takedown of Teachers and Education

Teachers are both overvalued and undervalued in our civilization, much like mothers. Bad teachers often get a free pass merely because they chose the honorable career of teaching. Here in Illinois, public school teacher is the cushiest of jobs, with massive benefits and handsome retirement packages. These benefits and retirement packages are much of the reason Illinois’s budget is an abyss of debt. Yet in my entire K-12 school career, there were all of 4-5 truly gifted teachers. The rest were middle of the road. Some of them were downright awful. My fourth grade teacher was so horrible to kids, she was later forced to publicly apologize. I believe she ended up resigning. There were several psycho gym teachers in my high school. One of them groomed and slept with his freshman students, often servicing a small harem of them at any given time despite him not being much to look at. Another one, a woman, broke down in multiple fits of rage with her students. I dimly remember the police getting involved. Another female teacher seduced a high-schooler and got caught when they were in the act. These were the all-too-human role models we kids were supposed to suck up to and emulate. Both then and now, they were and are a bunch of overpaid, comfortably numb suburbanites with no spark for life (unless you count the motivation to abuse and assault students).

Most teachers are the product of their times plus their environment. Very few break the mold. I had a handful of gifted teachers and I was privileged to have them. They were funny, they cracked jokes, they weren’t perfectionists, and above all, they made me and other students feel seen.

Toxic rainbow class clowns
For a while now, woke teachers have been installing rainbow flags in their improvised boho chic classrooms. The irony of rainbow symbolism is that the color that is most appropriate to wokesters and the corporations that yank their puppet strings is beige. The rainbow and DEI flags with their “inclusive” mishmash of colors could and should be replaced with a plain, monochrome sheet of light brown cloth with the word UNPERSON emblazoned upon both sides. The term unperson comes from George Orwell’s novel 1984, where to be made an unperson was to be ritually murdered and discarded in a memory hole so nobody would ever know you existed, except for a God that wasn’t supposed to exist. Unpersonhood was a permanent method of silencing/punishing anyone who disagreed with the State and its programming.
The DEI stripe pattern has been monochrome all along. It symbolizes the attempt to separate out white people, genocide them, utterly erase them from history, and move on as a unified blob of occasionally interbreeding brown people. In other words, it is designed to make whites into unpeople. The trouble is that Woke likes to convene in circular firing squads, so sooner or later, the Woke eats itself. Before that happens, the murderous sea of triumphant wokesters in their various colors of brown look a whole lot like beige.
Mothers are usually better teachers to what can be had in a public school. In the case of bright children, I don’t see why they wouldn’t be put in charge of a great deal of the finer details of the learning process once they are old enough to take out the garbage by themselves. The very last thing I needed from ages 9 - 17 was to be babysat, but that is exactly what happened. I was given lessons in docility and the wrong kind of inertia. I have discarded most of them.

Public schools are corporate grist mills designed to press as many as possible into the obedient, compliant mold of the salary class, no matter how ill the fit. The main goal of such a system is to oppress and squelch all forms of originality, vitality, and creativity from a child while pretending to encourage the same things. They are a beige factory turning out beige products pretending to be a prism.

School is not practical

A farm kid in Idaho does not need the same education as a music dork in Illinois. A future retail worker does not require the same education as a real estate broker. After elementary school basics have been instilled, there is no one school that can cover the diversity of fields needed to train young adults for their future vocations and livelihoods.

The goal of American education has been warped by the Eastern model. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean culture puts forth a conformist ideal that Americans have been striving to emulate for decades. The Eastern method of funneling obedient schoolchildren into obedient young adulthood and “success” in the corporate scene has become a transparently dog-eat-dog corporate pile of soul-selling. The salariman sits at the top of the vicious pyramid, seemingly guaranteed not to teeter off his massive pile of earned and unearned wealth, with swells of desperate salariman wannabes underneath him. The loyal office dwellers of wannabe status put in punishing 996 hours to support the dream. What is 996, you ask? It’s working 12 hours a day from 9am until 9pm, six days a week. Let’s imagine the life of a 996 office worker. After a youth squandered in a punishing school environment studded by stressful exams, he works grueling hours to support a family he rarely sees. His wife, if she is “lucky” enough to stay home, is an isolated, village-less drudge who bears the crushing responsibility of forcing their children through the expensive school/tutoring machine.

The Eastern apparatus is a revolving door of schools, tutors, and learning centers focused on one thing: excellent scores on periodic exams. In this warped fishbowl, children are mercilessly bullied and throttled from every angle, especially if they are misfits or nonconformists in any way. The exams that hold their future in check are the key to entering “good” universities where the next cogs in the machine can be finalized for universal compliance. Freedom? No. Originality? No. Communism on steroids? Yes. Do as you’re told or else. Be who we tell you to be or become an unperson.

If such a system of conformist thought has the power or durability to last the ages, it does not deserve it. Corporate communism is rife with sleaze, slime, and selling out. These aspects of human nature are not the ones I would argue are worth preserving. If the corporate model is all humanity has to offer, perhaps it is time to allow humanity to go extinct.

Excuse me while I trash gifted Korean instrumentalists…

Americans see the East’s standardized tests scores and become jealous, but I would argue that jealousy is misplaced. When I was in music school, there was no shortage of Korean girls attending American universities. They were sent abroad to overtrain on the piano. I witnessed many a tortured young woman molded into a misshapen standard of perfection by overbearing parents. Her kind aped the genius of elite, white European men of Enlightenment/Romantic eras. She never so much as wrote an original four measure melody. She became a trained jukebox for an excruciatingly specific period of music that nobody cares about anymore. She became a trophy and a status symbol as easily forgettable as last season’s Hermes bag. She was pretty and replaceable. There will be more of her next year.

In the Korean pianist, we see how education gets worked into a froth of status-anxiety and bland conformity. In the not-too-far-off future, there won’t be the kind of regular, fossil-fueled luxury required to mold perfectly functional children into perk-obsessed trophies who regurgitate lost Western excellence on command. Education needs to be re-localized, including in Korea, but I suppose that is material for another essay.