The Crime of Charging
or "A Paying in the What Next"
I have noted with a mixture of emotions from amusement to grief, that our poor dear oblivious institutionialists have reduced contemporary higher education to nothing more than a luxury item of the utmost extremes in costliness. It caused to pupil to color his or her choice of curriculum, not to suit his or her talents or aspirations, but rather his or her potential in repaying the debts incurred to meet the outrageous expense of today's employable collegiate accreditation.
It has caused public education to drop the most significant and important subject ever needed in true high school education, art, in order to bore each student to burn out by endless droning instruction on the skill of taking tests. No knowledge, just forcing the student to master the illusion of seeming to know more than they do. I must say, I really hadn't expected anything better from the flunkies responsible for such travesty, but it would have been nice to have been pleasantly surprised.
What they've done is make education unobtainable to those who might have been able to do something with it, like the hard-working poor person with initiative. It's a gyp. The evidence of the incitement lies in the failure of those attaining the qualifications of their degrees and accolades to perform any useful function in societies of any significant original worth. Can't you see how low modern civilization, what's left of it, has slumped? Nothing but a gutter tripe, low level pop culture, forced upon the unwillingly ignorant by a lazy, greedy entertainment industry.
Let's face it, the last time the United States accomplished true greatness was when the GI Bill paid enough to allow the ex-service person to fully fund a complete college education with it's auspices. That's when art, literature and music began to make a come-back. There were manned missions to the moon, engineers equipped only with slide-rules created things like the "Blackbird" flying at mach three.
Lest I give you the impression that I can do no better than be a mill of endless criticism, let me proffer some alternatives. The institutions will have to stay, as they have been doing ever since there was a rich sini nobilitatus (s.nob; not noble) milieu to enrich their coffers. Why get rid of them? But they should establish themselves as being in place to serve other purposes than elemental learning. Here we begin to see the true meaning of the establishment of institutes of knowledge in accordance to the specialty of their faculties in sciences, humanities and so on. In this case, the high tuition might even be justified. But let the aspirants undergoing their disciplines to attain those doctorates be those with the appropriate status and income to do so. In other words, a luxury for those who can afford it and then that's their business. But not as a necessity standing in the way of potential quality people and their careers, because that is a crime and should be recognized as such.
Meanwhile, the basic elements of higher learning on the associate and bachelor and even the master levels should be, alternatively, a form of public welfare in which the pupil is afforded sufficient time, nutrition, housing and materials to complete the tenure under supervision with adequately enforceable discipline but also faculty and security accountable to the appropriate levels of superior staff.
Housing and Campus can be granted from public lands, ecologically correct, and constructed by government auspices such as the Army Corps of Engineers (since apparently the Halliburton company or something like it now contracts to build the armed forces' structures).
The typical campus need not be exorbitant. It can easily mimic the minimal construction of the elementary military base of the early nineteen fifties, but with contemporary differences such as climate control and computer networking and maybe even underground-only structures in national parks, beneath the biosphere, similar to the underground establishments found at Couber Peedy in Australia.
Regardless of the proposed models, the basic tenant lies in one immutable prospect and that is that the pupil must be afforded the time and shelter to absorb sufficient curriculum to become an innovative element of society, sufficiently capable to contribute to the prosperity of the public as a whole. Those incapable of financing should not be kept away from this opportunity. This therefore is rather the responsibility of the society that would benefit and not that of the individual student to go to inordinate extremes to finance his or her future contribution to said society.
You are, as a society, demanding, by condoning these present establishments and their outrageous pecuniary demands on the individual forced to comply, that those individuals, the students, donate to the public they later would serve such a high price that the equivalent would pay for a decent house in the average suburban neighborhood. However, considering the destitution of the potential pupil and the necessity to incur inordinate debt to continue education anywhere, this can not be viewed as charity, but rather crime.
Think of how many worthy students were turned away because either they couldn't pay or they already have bad credit due to the artificially high cost of living and the unregulated price gougers. As for scholarships, there aren't enough. Not by a long shot. Get real.
I made up a joke about the steel worker that one day threw a couple of required bags of alloy into the molten steel, as they did back in those days. Then he threw in a huge burlap bag of coffee beans. "What in blazes you doin' Jake!" The others yelled. Jake yelled back, "Well, boys. It's time for you to wake up and smelt the coffee."
Well, it's time to wake up and realize that this little pat civilization is full of cracks.
I cite you who are responsible for this and here is your forfeit: you shall observe the inevitable fall of your civilization. By your own hand, your avarice has brought your own house down upon you. I would rather not see you suffer that inevitability. Instead I would prefer to see you not fall victim to the illusion of the concept of higher education as the form of institutional travesty it has become today. But I think you not able. Therefore at least rest assured that the self-made morons of history have repeated the vicious cycle you yourselves are inexplicably intent upon repeating.
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