Now Playing: a perfect circle - emotive
for the original purpose of college essay, have a look here or here
now, you know what annoyed me yesterday?
hayley's 9, in 4th grade, and yesterday someone from glendale college came to her class to talk about college. also, this week they've got a field trip to ucla (hayley won't be going, but not cause i think it's a stupid indoctrination thing to get kids thinking about college far too early, rather because of a scheduling conflict). and, for yesterday's "college day", they were allowed to wear sweatshirts from their favorite colleges...
let's go over that last bit again. fourth grade students, kids ages 9 and 10, are supposed to have favorite colleges? these kids are at best 9 years from college (barring early escape from lesser school) and we want them not only thinking about college but thinking about it so specifically to have a fucking favorite? i still wonder if hayley should be making and receiving the amount of phone calls she does, and now she's supposed to be planning for college? they really want to break a kid's spirit, don't they?
i mean, we wouldn't want kids to act like kids. and we certainly wouldn't want anyone to wait until, i don't know, after fucking puberty to make big decisions about the direction of her life, for god's sake. children MUST choose a career by age 10 or they will never be successful. that is certain, no?
they must enter preschool early, get into a good kindergarten, and, a la doogie howser, have the option of testing out of elementary and going straight to university... except that last part would be wrong, of course, since half the purpose of so many years of schooling is simply to delay entrance into the larger scope of things, the work force, for if we had too many people entering the work force at the same time, everything would fall apart... except that doesn't make much sense. inevitably, all those kids WILL join the work force (well, except for the ones who choose homelessness or what have you). staggering the entrances does not change the number of them. adding years and years onto the indoctrination (a la grad school and masters programs) does not change the numbers. it just makes everyone too damn busy to notice they are being taught things they will probably never need to know (and not in that high schooler's assumption way that even basic math is never gonna be useful, cause that's just rebellious, pubescent stupidity talking), and they are being dragged through so many tests and lectures that by the time they get out and get into the rat race of the working world, they're practically thankful, so much so that they forget that they've just escaped one prison only to be confined in a new one, just cogs in a machine (to mix metaphors), bricks in the wall, nails in the coffin of our culture and our world
fuck it. better to keep all the kids in line by confining them indefinitely to school than to have them thinking they could actually affect the world in any meaningful way. we qwouldn't want that, now, would we?