An Anoymous Question: College and Higher Education
I’ve gone to college. I’ve been to several colleges. I haven’t graduated yet and currently on leave from my most current school. I’ve been to a university of California, a private Catholic university, a community college, and two prestigious art schools. I’ve changed majors so far five times. I was: theater, painting, illustration, film, and fine arts. Plus, I was part of and lead several clubs and organizations. My current GPA is around a 3.5. I’ve studied on the West coast and the East coast. I’ve been through about six years of college so far. I know college very well. I might graduate someday. I have enough credits for it just none in the right places.
Overall, I was very disappointed with college. It was a lot of work but it wasn’t hard. I was hoping to find intelligent life and people I could relate to. I didn’t which is why I changed schools so many times because I thought perhaps it was the school and the crowd it attracted. First university was all sex, drugs, and beer. I’m straightedge and not into partying so I didn’t have much of a social life. The people were plastic, superficial and materialistic. So, I tried going to the extreme opposite which was a private Catholic university. The Catholic university was too Catholic – they taught creationism in the science classes and people thought that was a good thing so I had to leave. The art schools were pretentious, highly competitive, and cut throat. My fellow students were mean and jerks. The community college was something I tried to do to just get a few credits while in limbo but being surrounded by the people who attended it depressed me so much I just had to drop out.
I think college is a system within the System. It’s part of the capitalistic machine to train the next generation of workers. It’s also a system of control. Knowledge is power and the rich don’t want to part with it. Depending on which college you go to depends on what education you will get. If you go to Standford, they’ll teach you to be a CEO. If you go to a state school, they teach you to be a manager. It’s very classist because college is about the money not about teaching. If you can’t afford it, you’ll be working minimum wage jobs for the rest of your life with a few rare exceptions. In college, it’s more of the formal conditional received through the public school system as they try to control how you’ll think and relate to the world. They fill your head full of knowledge that has their slant to it. They want you to think in their terms with their ideas. They don’t want you thinking for yourself.
With that being said, the only way the system is going to change is if the people change it. The only way the system is going to change is from within. Have you seen the movie SLC Punk? Stevo’s realization that you can do more harm to the system from within than from the outside leads him to go back to school to become a lawyer. The only way the we’re going to destroy the system of control is to become the system then dismantle it. If the people don’t want the system to be there, it wouldn’t be there. We could build a new world.
I think college education is important to become the system to fight the system. I am considering going back to school to get a women’s and gender studies degree and then going on to get a PH.D. I want to teach the world about peace, love, freedom from oppression and hierarchies, and equality. However, I recently talked to a former professor of mine who has a PH.D and mentioned my idea, thinking that having a credential would make people more willing to listen to me. His exact words to me were, “I have a PH.D and it doesn’t make people listen to me.†So, I am unsure right now if I really need school. It all depends on what you want to do with your life and if school will help get you there. It’s a personal thing and the answer is different for everyone.
