I’m not sure whether or not I’ve brought this idea up in the blog before (I can’t read the blog and write it at the same time, a minor flaw in the system, or in my knowledge of the system) but there is a single thread running through really quite a lot of what ticks me off in the world, in the church and in how things are run in modern western society. This spills down into so many aspects of human life that it becomes the source of much of my irritation in an average day.
Our image of success no longer includes or even supports relationships that exist solely for the purpose of human interaction. We’ve professionalized so many functions of life that we no longer have a visceral attachment to the things and activities of our lives and have lost the relationships that spring from those attachments.
Not clear? It was hard enough to write but I’ll spend some time hashing out what I mean.
We seem, as a society, to have discarded much of what makes for genuine relationships, not just with people, but also with the things of this world. Our food is sanitized and packaged and is therefore far removed from having been a living creature at one point, or having been dirty at some point, or even of having been in any other state than the one we purchase. (as if Twinkies were “born” in those little cellophane sleeves) One of the hallmarks of success for many people is that they no longer have anything to do with the maintenance of their vehicles. Their oil is changed in tidy little oil-marts and they are treated to coffee and CNN in the waiting room. When was the last time you heard of someone doing their own brake job? When was the last time you heard of a High School that still had an auto shop? They’re out there, but they’re rare. Most of the time, we shuttle “those people” off to Vocational ED centers where all of the “non-academic” schoolkids go. Out of sight, out of mind, apparently. So now people who do excel in academics have little or no opportunity to even learn about basic physical, vocational skills.
I can build a boat, conjugate a verb in five languages, weld and cast metal, calculate the speed of a chemical reaction, fix my brakes and rebuild a carburetor and dissect a shark. This isn’t bragging on my own account, but rather a demonstration of the things you had the opportunity to explore in my schooling.
I suppose that the aim is to make the students more able to compete in the workplace. They need the advanced skills in order to secure admission to a good college, a good job and a good life, so the story goes.
But what seems to happen is that the people who are shuttled off to Voc Ed end up being the shadow mechanism that enables the livelihoods of the “elite” who stay in academic classes. They may have to get dirty for their living, but without them, the lives of the others would grind to a halt, not because they grow the food or they provide the services that the others desire, but because the elites have been denied the skills to live a life that is in actual contact with the things and processes of the world.
I think that this is one of the reasons that some of the most important people on the planet, the teachers, are more and more being viewed as functionaries in the lives of those that they teach, as if they were the vocational underclass who is there to implement the curricula that their bosses select and pay tax money to acquire and nothing else. If they are simply servants of the system, another way to separate people from the vicissitudes of raising children, then we grow to trust the system” rather than the teachers. The system teaches our children what they need to know. The system is the depersonalization of life and so some are groomed and some are doomed because of forces beyond their control, their birth, their social situation, their income. I’m not trying to say that there are not ways to overcome this, but many people fall prey to it anyway.
I think that this little screed may take as many as fifteen iterations to get it free of my head, I’ll try and interesperse them with more uplifting topics
