Schooling or Education?

Mark Twain once wrote he refused to let his schooling interfere with his education. What did he mean?

Education is training on truth. It is accurate and ethical and lies in contradistinction to both government-funded daycare indoctrination centers and conferral of accredited college degrees. 

Most of what is called "education" at present is miseducation, ideological pabulum entraining false, unworkable ideas. It's the last bastion of the incompetent, often where loser women and feminized men devour others' kids, sometimes in lieu of having (or deadening) their own. Part of what makes the "education" system so toxic is the stifling overprotection of misapplied maternity instincts. (This partially explains why some areas of public education remain dominated by single, childless, and post-menopausal women.)

But both mom and dad are supposed to work, or they got divorced and it's just a single parent contending with the realities of a pregnant teenager who dropped out of high school, so we need a tax-subsidized daycare service and enforced redistribution of wealth, right? The experts say it's a good idea, and if they didn't give you a talking diploma, you are unworthy of having an opinion, right? That's what "science" says, right?

No. Completely wrong and back asswards.

No, anyone can tell a tree by its fruit. The utility of bad education is not just zero, it is predictably negative; things don't just fail to improve when you're acting out lies -- they get worse. Much, much worse. This is as true for the naïve and innocent as it is for the willfully ignorant and pedigreed. 

When I say things are getting worse, I'm referring in part to the tens of millions of dead bodies resulting from enactment of bad ideas in our 20th Century, and humanity as a group might not be done with those bad ideas. There can be a lot of cultural insistence (and plenty of funding) to advance unworkable, BAD ideas and false data. It doesn't matter how news stations report on it, or who's locked up for saying unapproved thoughts out loud -- either an airplane lifts into the air at the end of a runway, or it does not.

Whether or not it is reported, and regardless of the last person or group assigned the blame by official channels and masturbating experts.

This is unfortunately, because accepting bad ideas and acting them out deadens the body, enslaves the mind, and shackles the spirit.

I bring this up to point out that all of this mess isn't education. They are technically *mis*education. Miseducation is lying to people in service of ideological ends, inculcating lies and dumbing people down to make them rubes. This makes their thoughts and feelings more controllable. When coupled with displaced hostility and identity politics, it creates rioters and insurrectionists.

Miseducation is no less so when it is proclaimed "science" by whoever happens to be sitting on that throne of swords. Neither is it less miseducation when those lies are clothed in complex semantic structures or parroted in the cult slogans of experts, even when the messaging is published.

Education, in contrast, is learning what is true. Things are true when they are true. It is not a matter of consensus agreement. It is not a matter of authority granted by states, accreditation boards, or panels of esteemed experts. Some of the dumbest, most inconsequential people I have ever met have PhDs.

See, those seeking permission from others to continue their unconscious plodding along hide in degrees, in flattened words like insight, innovation, or any other word that distracts from the hollowness within the honorable men. They were, after all, all honorable men.

Part of what disorients people when they start digging themselves out is that our language has been hollowed out to prey on the cowardice and insincerity of the mediocre mass. They'll say anything for a paycheck. They are the whores of Corporate Town, and money is their master.

In truth, you've only learned something useful when what you've learned improves things, for yourself and for others.

So what does this have to do with education?

It is likely that fewer than 3% of current college students are interested in receiving _any_ education. On anything. I’m taking that word back, here -- education. Here is my linguistic territory: I mean education as distinct from schooling, inculcation, false expertise, and displaced hostility.

There is a cycle here of loss and confusion leading to increasingly lower-resolution understanding. It occurs harmonically across physical, mental, and spiritual domains. It explains political movements. It’s also how a person with a PhD comes to confuse the inside of his own colon with the world itself.

Besides, if 3% of current college students are interested in education, fewer than 10% of those people are willing and able to do what it takes to develop notable competence. This is also true of employees in large corporations. It's called Price's Law. 

Instead of knowing things, people know dead facts surrounding the things. Instead of learning about things that work, things they can use to produce and innovate, 97% prefer to hide in empty degrees, internal marketing, and dishonestly purport themselves to be experts. They withhold their approval and gain political voice by being critical of others in the 97% who secretly know they're full of shit.

A V.P. at a multibillion dollar company once told me that she knows everyone else is lying because she lies all the time, and that means everyone else is, too. Another V.P. at this same company told me that an innovation that doesn't cost unnecessary millions will never be accepted, because that's not the story the brass wants to tell. These types don't want the dramatization to fall apart, for someone with 10% of the experience to outcreate within a single week what 97% of their employee base accomplishes in a full year. 

The (mis)education system prepares good worker bees to compete for opportunities to report into low-class corporate politicians whose bureaucracies replace anything alive with a fracked, spent, midlife misery. For the workers, I mean, who spend most of their lives doing something passionless under the false promise that their piddling "retirement" and social security payments will provide opportunities for fulfilling adventure as their body finishes decaying into death. 

The (mis)education system is literally there to enable exploitation of local stakeholders for the enrichment of distant shareholders. This is why HR is among the most depersonalizing, reptilian functions on Earth. Each employee is a number, and the goal is for all employees to be as replaceable as cogs on a cold, metal clock wheel.

Of course, in our animal farm reality of everyone being equal, some are more equal than others.

Iterated over time, the ratio of competent people to filler continues decreasing. Those who could help cease doing so. Groups of mediocre company-resource consumers remain, like metastasized tumor groups soaking up more and more resources while displacing what remains of functional parts in the organization (same root as organism). 

Eventually, the organization either dies or eats enough smaller organizations still capable of innovation and play to offset its death cycle. 

The word “about” means around. You can recognize this 97% miseducated employee base because they talk only “about” things. They talk about innovation, empathy, rationality, ethics, education, whatever --or they talk about talking about those things-- but they never actually practice them. These types prattle on endlessly about these things, but they never even come close to the things themselves. They're also secretly terrified of competence (or deny straight out that competence can exist in a tiny minority of people who are great). They end up attacking people who embody the things they pretend to be (e.g., innovative, empathetic, rational, ethical, educated). More than anything, this 97% is horrified that you might see them for what they are: fake, miserable, numb, miseducated, narcissistic, histrionic, incompetent, and inconsequential.

Thus, those who purvey misinformation come to see misinformation everywhere. Those who are secretly hateful and bigoted come to see hate and bigotry in everyone else. 

Instead of removing the log in their own eyes, they fixate on the specks in others'.

Thus ravages miseducation in our post-informational age.

Given this state of things, and the stupidopoly of public schooling, people are more inclined to pay others not to encounter truth. They're too jaded. Some of the evilest fuckers among these think home school is the problem! 😂

People pay for miseducation because their owners and aligned giant employers incentivize it. As a rule, people will not pay for education, because it is not “accredited” by the super knowledgeable experts on our thought police boards. Hard science is still mostly held accountable, because it's grounded in local, testable solutions and can therefore be wrong. 

Soft sciences are death traps for idiots and those desiring to be owned.

Actual education is not subsidized by massive government loan subsidies amounting to trillions of dollars – called “loans” despite the high likelihood that the vast majority of them will never be paid back. But most people don't think they should pay for truth -- that should be free, like sunlight for plants. But it's ok for college degrees to cost tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars.

It's all the perfect reasonableness of honorable men. They were all honorable men.