Curmudgeon's Corner
A semi-regular editorial from the staff at Humor Is Dead

10/13/03 - Here's a modern myth for ya - that the educational system - in this society - is a place to "learn" and challenge your intellect.

In fact, it's a place where you learn to sit down and shut up for long periods of time in order to tolerate institutional servitude. These days, if you have a problem with that, there are plenty of drugs available to kill your creativity. For those who can afford private school, one learns more about how to control others rather than how to tolerate being controlled.

Those who get into the working world and assume a cube and find they cannot tolerate their lot often go back to grad school, where individuality is compromised even more and one can become a political pawn to a department and a personal slave to a professor, whose ideologies must tirelessly defended - and whose ass must be tireless kissed - in order to graduate. An exception is the MBA degree, which is an overtly expressed wish to be a manager - or managed - for life, and not a boat-rocking idealogue.

Finally, these years will successfully undermine your potential as a human being and translate into an advanced degree, allowing you to go back into the workforce and endure being someone's flogging boy. If you're smart, however, you can stay in academics or find a management position, where you can transfer your frustration by denigrating and commandeering others.

If you really get out of line, you can end up in prison, which is essentially middle school all over again (and looks exactly like it with the exception of the barbed wires.) You have recess, nap time, do chores, and fight on the playground.

And if you get though it all, you might end up in a "convalescent home" - which happens when your net working output potential outweighs the cost of having you around. In that case, it's best you are sent yet again to something that looks like middle school/prison but is staffed by untrained sadists whose job it is to empty your bedpan and have you turn from frail (but alive) into a carcass so that a new live body can take your place, thereby maximizing turnover (and profits).

Think about this - if you get a D in school, no one in the school cares. If you show up late, you get a detention.