I think my true education began when my formal education ended. Ever since then it seems like I've been unlearning, peeling off the layers of prejudice, conventional wisdom and preconceptions draped over me by my upbringing, school and the mass media that fill the void where our culture used to be. I often feel I would've been better off left to my own devices and the common sense God (or the Universe) gave me.
I can't escape the feeling of having been duped. I jumped through all the academic hoops and was slotted into a corporate dead end. Success in school is predicated on uncritically accepting the views of your teachers. I integrated their opinions into my paradigm with little revision or examination. I usually took their words at face value. Their beliefs and the curriculum were nearly gospel to me. I'd been raised, consciously or not, to believe in the infallibility of the public school curriculum.
Questions didn't arise until I had my bachelor's degree, and, after 5 years of working as a corporate clerk, I still couldn't get the rewarding job I'd been led to believe was waiting at the end of the academic rainbow.
So much education is directed toward overturning common
sense in the interest of the oligarchy. As our common culture has faded,
this propaganda has become more effective. The middle class is
thoroughly brainwashed, having forgotten our working-class roots and the
struggle against the elite that was required for us to become
bourgeois.
