Re: Education (was Re: marxism-digest V1 #1811)

["ÁÎ×Ó¹â HenryC.K.Liu ¹ù¤l¥ú" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

American students are a real enigma.  Never before has the young been so
thoroughly co-opted into the system via a slave mentality.

The US educational system is the foundry of its capitalist system.  It
is run essentially as a lottery to mask it real function of a slave
farm.  A minute percentage of its graduates are selcted to inherit the
fruits of the system while the mass of the students are conditioned to
trade off social justice for the slim chance of winning.  Thus the
education system emphasizes technical performance, a throughbred farm
with horses eager to put social binders on.  Their vision is similar to
those of a horse, fearfully exaggerating the threat of any social
change.
When a first year graduate from law school is paid $160K per year, the
reason such economics works is that he/she is a wheel in the capitalist
system of wealth creation. First year associates in law firms do not
really do anything useful besides fill in forms and updating legal brief
written previously by filling in new client names.

Class is being obscured by social hierachy based on income.  The best
engineer stays in the low end of the hierachy, unless he leaves
engineering to become an entreprenneur, which is the respectable label
put on one who has found a legal way to exploit as many people
indirectly as possible.  Indirect systemic expolitation has the
advantage of not involving direct confrontation.  To take $100 from
someone directly requires confrontation, but to take one dime from 10
million people is smooth and pleasant.  The lottery does exactly that.
It takes small amounts from the masses, keeps 75% and redistribute 25%
to the lucky few.

For students to be a leading social force again, they must first take
control of the campuses and get rid of the throughbred farm mentality
and restore education to what it should be: a process of awarenss
awakening.
TA strikes for higher wages and shorter hours are well deserved, but not
the essential issue.  Well teachers and social/health workers get paid
$160K/year, thats when we are getting somewhere.

Henry C.K. Liu

John Lacny wrote:

> --- Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > In the United States I would assume about 80% of the
> > student body are working class.
>
>         Dead-on.  Students in the US-- most of them, that
> is-- are far from privileged brats.  I speak in
> defense of most people I know, if not myself, since I
> have a full scholarship.  But for most students it's
> no picnic.
>
>         I just got back from a preliminary meeting for this
> year's United States Student Association (USSA)
> lobbying on Capitol Hill.  It's a dire situation.
> Things are getting much worse for students from the
> working class.  It used to be that the Pell Grant
> covered a huge part of your education; that's no
> longer so.  Over the past decade loans have increased
> by 108% while grants have only increased by 63%; 25
> years ago, need-based aid covered 80% of all financial
> aid, while now it covers less than 40%.  The type of
> aid that is increasing is tax-based incentives-- which
> is to say, loans to people who are already not in the
> lowest tax brackets, which means that the
> lowest-income students get shafted.
>
>         Some of the tax incentive stuff is probably meant to
> offset the effects of the incredibly restrictive
> means-testing which applies to almost all social
> programs in the US, financial aid most certainly not
> excepted.  But the bottom line is, only very
> low-income students can get grants, but those grants
> are far from enough.  And the end result is that
> people end up leaving school with a pile of debt--
> after most of them have had to work jobs (not "a job,"
> mind you, but several, simultaneous jobs) to get
> through college in the first place.  Because most
> students are from the working class.  Demanding
> universal free higher education is the only thing
> that's going to relieve the burden on them.  To attack
> it as a petty-bourgeois perk, in the manner of the
> kind of "ascetic socialism" we have all been
> denouncing on this list, is a little galling to say
> the least.
>
>         John Lacny
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