welcome to higher education.
Social darwinism leads to people competing rather than cooperating...
and i think we can even see that right here in this thread, perhaps?
but,
Mr. Busta, speaking as one who sucks at that same teat as your Prof does...i'm going to go out on a limb and ask a personal question: are you among the first in your famliy to attempt much education beyond high school?
i ask, because if you are, then we have something in common. i wasn't only the first BA, i was the first post-BA, and there is a gap there i can never fully explain to the good folks back home. and yet, while i am now somewhat comfortably employed in The House, i still don't get to live there. funny how that happens, what with student loans and all.
can't speak to your Prof's personal sitch, but he's obviously not only drank the kool-aid, but come back to ask for the whole punch bowl. idiot. i'd like to meet him sometime at a nice polite faculty function and whack him upside his sad old head.
i can forgive the Old Folks Back Home when they repeat mindless FoxNews garbage at me, but your Prof should know better, being all educated and shit. he is doing to you exactly what he was trained to do. sad bastard probably even believes his own BS by now.
don't let him get away with it. keep your head. stay cool. whether he knows it or not, he's working on weeding you out, but you are too smart for that. even if the whole rest of your class is baa-ing along with him like sheep, you may still peel one or two of them away, if you're nice about it.
whether you stay in school, or choose to focus your energy in a different path, don't let them beat you so easy. it may not be obvious, but on most campuses, you are not alone in what you see and how you think about it.
there are even paid "house" types on every campus who are with you. i know quite a few on my campus. i'm one of them. my father was a mill worker, and without the Union i'd never have got the chance at college, and my grandfathers were also in mills or coal mines...till wars took them away and killed them. before that, their fathers and grandfathers were burned out of their homes by european aristocrats who figured sheep were a better business than peasants. and some long ways prior to THAT, we might actually have been Free People. imagine!
same shit, different day.
what you are learning now is how to get along...what you never want to do, is end up like your dead-soul Prof. it is possible, tho not easy, to jump the hoops and not lose yourself. i respect those who walk away, but i also think there is value in trying to stand and keep that door open for others. can we change "the system" from within? probably not. but we can catch a lot of other people, maybe give them a clue, give them a chance to recognize their inherent freedoms as humans?
you need to have a good think about what you're doing, and why, and what you want to get from it. if you choose to continue with the academic path, you need to know you can't fight the Walking Dead head on. that Prof has been pissing around with people like you for years and he's probably got a lot of tricks that he knows work. of course you are right, and he is an ass, but that doesn't change the equation. the further up you swim, the more of it you'll see. but you'll see good ones, too. and you'll see what they can do for a person's mind.
i am not a fan of our current system of education, from start to finish. whether most involved in it know it or not, the main purpose it serves is to keep most people in line. if you're poor but smart enough, they pull you out early in special "gifted" classes and they push you into college regardless of the debt you and your family take on to manage it. what that does is alienate you from your original peers. you get promised you can join the Rich Club, but that never really happens. their goal isn't to grant you upward mobility, it is to make certain you don't hang around in the "fields" with your extra brains and lead any revolts or escapes, or gods forbid, any labor movements. if they can hang a mess of school debt around your neck in the process, all the better in their eyes.
thank you for posting your rant. it gives people like me some hope, 'cause sometimes i can't tell if any of the kids are listening at all or if they're too propagandized to be reached anymore, and i can't be too much off-the-rez too openly or i'll get shuffled off to some branch campus in a hell hole backwater.
i can't imagine this is anything more than cold comfort, if even that. but, it is what it is. all i can offer is to tell you i think you are right, and it isn't totally hopeless. if you are not racking up massive debt, try to stick with it, but understand the world you're getting into, and never lose sight of what really matters in life.
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