Thoughts for Your Penny?

Max's Post:

The bell rings and hoards of children are flushed out of their classrooms. Waddling towards the parking lot, little Max looks sucker-eyed at his fourth-grade report card. He scans through every section a second time, a third. His fat cheeks wibble wobble excitedly and he fills his tiny lungs with a proud breath.

Straight A's! Yippee Skippers!

The march to his mom's car is triumphant. He plays it down, though. I don't know why but he wants to pretend he's upset about something, he wants her to see his long face, then the report card, then add it up, then get angry, then snatch the report card out of his hand, then look it over, then...

“Aaaahhh! Sweetie, I'm so proud of you! ”

She hugs her son. He's smiling like an idiot now, but he still tries to shrug it off.

“I'm serious Max. This is a great achievement!”

“Thanks Mom.”

“You see? You work hard, and it pays off! And this,” she holds up the report card, “this is SO important Max. With a good education, you can do anything you want........”

…...............................

What an unfortunate crock of shit.

No, that's not actually how I responded to my mother that day, way back when. I probably... well, I DID lap it up completely. I was sold on the idea (and so was she, to be fair). Education, for me, was my way of making my parents proud, it was my way of being better than everyone else, it was my way of competing with my brothers (safe to say that I always won, of course), it was my way of securing this successful future that I was constantly being told about even though it remained as intangible an idea for my young brain as... pffft, I dunno... getting married or something. Most of all, getting good grades meant free game tokens at Chuck E Cheese's, Ski Ball, ball pits and tubes (through which I could barely fit and only if I buttered myself up first), pizza, bread sticks, and all manner of greasy stuff to keep my pudgy ass on the road to diabetes. And let's not forget that lovable quintet of animatronic goons: Jasper T. Jowls, Helen Henny, the man himself - Chuck E. Cheese, the sole human of the bunch – part-time drummer, full-time racial stereotype – Pasqually, and the fucking purple... thing, Mr. Munch.

In retrospect, Chuck E. Cheese's seems to have been the most justifiable initiative to get a “good” education.

“Education?” you ask. “So, your beef is with... education?”

Mmm, nail on the head Sonny Jim.

Now, before I clamber back onto my termite-riddled soap box, let me just address that little thought in your head. You're wondering if all of my posts are going to be pissy, downhearted rants?

No.

Scratch that.

Yes. In some form or another, they will be. I promise I'll address an equal number of serious and silly topics along the way, but I can't promise that I won't inevitably bring both back around to my bitter brand of anger and irony. Hopefully it will at least be entertaining. It might even be interesting. You never know. We might get lucky.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm not a particularly sunny person. I don't think I ever was. I've never been described as “cheery.” Teachers in elementary school were constantly asking me “what's wrong”? What were these so-called “teachers” really teaching me there? From my vantage point now, I see a chubby kid, relatively bright, having his brain exposed to mild and flabby authority figures who, unknowingly, are injecting it with this silly, never-ending notion that someone who isn't smiling or cackling like a moron has something “wrong” with them.

Growing up in quietly psychotic, middle-class suburbia, these things pass in front of your face and you don't even bat an eye. Southern California, especially, is a ridiculous sub-planet, a moon even, floating a desert away from the mainland, and everyone there has just plain forgotten what the hell normal people live like. Or, (and I'm leaning more towards this option)... they've never known. Whether one or the other is true, the common trait in the people there is this: they don't give a shit about how anyone else lives. And, if you're there long enough, you don't give a shit either. You'd forget how to breathe oxygen if it was fashionable in Orange County. You really pick up on this when you leave for a while, come back, see how funny everything is, and notice that no one there seems to think so. I've actually seen a coach for a junior high volleyball team pull a girl out of the game because she wasn't “smiling enough.” Surprisingly, this didn't make the girl smile more. Me, however, my cheeks hurt like hell.

Anyway, where was I?...

Education.

Education, education, education, education... ad infinitum. It's pretty much become synonymous with the American Dream, this thing we call education. A good education can bring a poor man from the proverbial rags to the oh so cherished riches. A good education can turn immigrants, and their children, into flourishing citizens. A good education gets you the keys to the castle. A good education, as my parents always told me, was more important than anything. And I believed that.

Why?

Well... It helps to understand that America is a manic country. There was never any doubt that we're an excitable bunch, but I'm talking about our warped obsession with becoming, well, obsessed. I'm talking about our weird, collective compulsion to go BIG or go home. And, most of all, I'm talking about our fanatical apotheoses of certain cultural values for reasons none of us really understand. Education is one of these values, and we're certainly maniacs for it.

And no, don't be stupid, I'm not trying to come up with some argument for why education is actually a bad thing. I'm arguing against the sick, blind, moronic lust we have for the promises that education supposedly brings, and the things we're so eagerly willing to sacrifice for them

We're maniacs I say. And our manias take the most hilarious forms, but we're all so knee-deep in it that we can't see the humor. Suburbia, in particular, is an understated freak-show where parents will obsess over their kids' sports teams, scout troops, dance competitions, social lives, and especially their education. It's insane. 4 out of every 5 or 6 cars has multiple, inane bumper stickers proclaiming that their child is a “star student,” an “honor roll student,” a “super learner,” “my child can read,” “my child can wipe his ass,” “you must be so proud,” “who the hell cares?”

Here's the unsurprising part: no one wants to admit that they're kids are average. I get that, to some extent. The problem comes when we parade around our children's average qualities as if they're worthy of supreme praise; filling them, like cheesy party balloons, with unwarranted confidence. Here we see the problem germinating. This little snowball starts a-rollin' downhill and, year after year, it picks up more confidence, praise, ambition and so on. And what do we get later on? Ridiculous numbers of kids who have sacrificed a lot of their learning because they truly believe they could have a future in sports, kids who sacrifice their fun and reckless years because they truly believe that they can get into an Ivy League school, kids who sacrifice hundreds of thousands of their parents dollars to go to (less than) mediocre Universities because they truly believe a college education (any college education) will make them successful, kids who waste their time, money, and talent by studying completely useless subjects because they truly believe that there's some economic value in knowledge for knowledge's sake (I belong to this category), and kids who sacrifice working experience in the real world and run to grad school because, at this point, they are truly, truly afraid of not being a student, and they truly believe that employers will want 28-30 year old, overeducated dweebs to run their companies.

Ask Zak, the econ guy, to explain this a bit better. A college education used to be held in high regard because it was a valuable and unique commodity. Now, we have supersaturated the shit out of the market with it and, surprise, surprise, it's less valuable! Every parent wants their kid to go to college because they refuse to acknowledge their kid's true worth. Shitty liberal arts colleges, shitty trade schools, shitty state schools, shitty private schools are cashing in on our terror of mediocrity, our dread of “failure,” and our blind addictions to education and status. Does this not sound scarily like some cliché fashion fable? Education is becoming a personal profile accessory that we must have, we've gotta have it, we don't care how much it costs, we'll pay it, we wouldn't be caught dead without it!

“Where does it all end?” you ask. We're in the process of finding that out and, believe me, it's costing us. It used to be that ignorance was the black burden suffocating the same woebegone classes that praised anyone with a “good education.” Simple moms and dads wanted their children to read, see the world, uncover the unreachable mysteries of intelligence, and have a better life than they did. And boy, oh boy, do we have a blacker burden hovering over us these days. If only ignorance were our chief obstacle. But we're something far worse than ignorant...

… we're useless.

But, maybe it's not so bad. I hear Chuck E. Cheese's has recently decided to award free tokens for college transcripts as well. Awesome.