A Bit Of Confusion

There are two posts going sort of hand in hand. They are my attempts at humor. Unfortunately most don’t find me funny. The thing is, if you take a lot of notions we take for for truths, if you look sort of cross-eyed, they are kind of funny because they make little real sense. There’s time to play, there’s a time to learn, there’s a time to work.

Really how can you learn by a stopwatch? But we do learn to work and play by a stopwatch and so we learn as well when we can learn and how to measure what one has learned.

It’s not that it’s offensive, but it really is the height of humor.

There is a time and place to learn.. It is called school. If you work hard in school  you become educated enough to continue being educated and when you are educated you get the credentials to state that Now I Am Educated.  Education has little to do with learning.  It is a manner of determining.who can be certified as having earned the credentials and at what level of work you are qualified to participate in.

So to earn your credentials and determine what level of pay you will earn you must, they tell us, work hard at school.  So is it work or is it school, or is school not about learning at all but an entry level job.

If it is a job why is it unpaid?  If you have work you should be paid.  If the pay a student earns is dependent on not tests but on the amount of knowledge one demonstrates in dialogue—which is how one ultimately how one earns the highest credential, becomes certified to as really smart, as a PH.D–see the PH.D means I Worked Really Hard And Now I’m Smart Enough To Tell Others I’m Smarter Than They Are.  But to get to that level of certified smartness, you have to write some original stuff and work hard and then demonstrate your smartness to already certified really smart people through explaining to a panel of those certified smart people that you deserve to become certified just like them.  So you go have to present  yourself in many fields and defend your thesis.  

Of course I’m certified really dumb.  The lowest level of dumb, ‘cause brother I never even got the minimum certified smart person certification, a high school diploma.  Without a high school diploma I get the only possible certification that is given to people without any certification.  I am not uncertified, there is a certification for people like me.  It’s the certification. Dumbest of the Dumb.  I am allowed (I suppose) to hang it on my wall. At least I always hung mine that I had printed for me.  Actually I went to college.  I was kind of an odd man out.  An older guy, not really one the kids were hanging out with.  I got a diploma, though, a certified Diploma that says “Summa Cum Laude” on it.  I’m not too proud of it.  At least I never hung it on my wall. As far as all were concerned an older returning to college is still Dumb.  I had a few mates, but mostly I associated with professors.  I invited them to dinner and we talked and they were my study group.  And they were really smart and I learned really a lot.  The economics professor lived next door to me.  Actually he was a couple of years younger than me.  But I could not enroll in his classes.  I had none of the prerequisites to do so so I wasn’t certified to  become certified by enrolling in his classes.  But he did lend me his library and recommended other texts he didn’t actually possess, and we spent a great deal of time discussing the economists of yore and present.  I was very fortunate, I had more access to both his time and to more information than his students probably did.  The only problem was that no matter what I might have learned from his books and from him, my only certification in economics was Unqualified To Know Anything About Economics.  Or Not Smart Enough To Question Those Who Were Certified Qualified  To Know Everything About Economics.  

And all this time I was working really hard at my job, and even harder at my schooling.  But my work at my job got me a paycheck and my work at school was not.

So if I have to work to go to school why do I receive no pay?  Oh, the reward is to come later and I will earn more pay later from the work I do at school.  Now of course there are unpaid internships in some professions, so I guess school is a very long 16-25 year unpaid internship.  And since almost no one can survive unpaid for so long we have grants and scholarships and guess what–loans to pay you.  But if I have to pay for a loan to work in school  to earn my certification to be paid for what I worked really hard to earn, isn’t this like the boss in my factory making me pay him to work for him until I can pay him back for allowing me to work for him.

I have to admit, I am confused by the entire concept of school.  If I go to school to learn, but have to do homeWORK to learn, why don’t I just do the homeWORK  if the purpose is to learn.  Well I don’t know,  I know I had an argument with my son’s America because my son told me the teacher told him there were forty-eight states.  Of course he couldn’t believe that there were 50 states because I was the uncertified dumb parent and the teacher was certified to know how many states there are.  So I met with the teacher after classtime  which he got paid for, but I had to take time from my work and not be paid to take my son to confront the teacher.

Of course I was absolutely wrong. “See,” my son says.  There were 46 and Hawaii and Alaska became states to make 48.  See, he reads from a book, there are 48 states in the continental United States.  “But Alaska and Hawaii are not included in the continental United States.”  “Well they became part of the continental United States.  Hawaii was the 47th and Alaska was the 48th.”  “Wait a minute, Alaska became the 49th in 1958 and Hawaii the 50th in 1959.”  “ No Hawaii was first.”  “Can you read me a text on that?”  “No I Just know because I was taught, your son told me you were a high school dropout so there's no way you could know.”  “Except I was in school when they did become states so I remember when they became states and so I know when they did become states.”  “Well you remember wrong, the books I learned don’t lie.”  “Well I might agree with that if you could show me the book that says what you’re saying.”  “Well I could but you wouldn’t be able to read it since you dropped out of high school.”  “I assure you I can read  if you show  me the book where it says that.”  “How do I know if I show you the book you will really be able to read it.  You might  just say it says 50 because you won’t be able to really read it.”  

My son was sort of purplish and he says to me, “Come on Ken, you’re making a fool of yourself.  The teacher knows better than you.”

And of course my son was absolutely right, the teacher’s certification proved he was right.  But I proved to my son (I think) that the certified teacher should not have earned his certification.  I had him count the states on the map, a big map that included Hawaii and Alaska.  “That’s strange,”my son said, “that a teacher could be wrong.”

So maybe I do understand why they don’t pay students.  You can’t very well teach students slavery is beneficial if you’re paying them to go to school, can you?

P.S.  I intend no implications that all, or most, or even any other teacher of American history does not know the correct number of states in the United States.  I certainly hope he is the only one.  A couple of years later when a young man we had taken in was entering high school history that teacher was no longer teaching American history, at least not at that high school.