Fear & Loathing in Professional College

What is the freshman experience? If we follow that question seriously it will lead us past the zone of academic bullshit, where dedicated teachers pass their knowledge on to a new generation, and into the nitty-gritty of human needs and hang-ups.

First, let's see what's happening now. Let's look at the role students play in what we like to call education. College is where we let the dying society inject its venom into us. They exploit and enslave students, they petrify society and they make democracy unlikely. And it's not what we are taught that does the harm but instead how we are taught.

College freshmen are pushed around, their will is stolen, they are turned into timid square apathetic slaves --authority addicts. A student is expected to know his place. The faculty tells us what courses to take, what to read, what to write, and frequently, where to set the margins on his word processed document. They tell us what's true and what isn't. Some teachers insist that they encourage dissent but they're almost always just teasing and every student knows it.

In fact, for the freshman student, it doesn't make that much difference which program you're in. The real lesson is the method. The medium in college truly is the message. And the medium is, above all, coercive. You're forced to attend. The subjects are required. You have to do homework. You must observe college rules. And throughout, you're bullied into docility and submissiveness. They may pad the handcuffs--but the handcuffs stay on.

It's how you're taught that does the harm. You may only study geometry for a semester-- or Calculus for two years. But doing what you're told, whether or not it makes sense, is a lesson you get every blessed school day for twelve years or more. You know how malleable we humans are. And you know what good learners we are--how little time it takes us to learn to drive a car or a plane or to play passable guitar. So imagine what the effect must be upon our apt and impressionable minds of a twelve-year course in servility.

Twelve years pitted against your classmates in a daily Roman circus. The game is Doing What You're Told. The winners get gold stars, affection & envy. They get A's, honours, awards and college scholarships. The losers get humiliation and degradation. The fear of losing the game is a great fear: it's the fear of swats, of the principal's office, and above all the fear of failing. What if you fail and have to watch your friends move past you to glory? And, of course, the worst could happen: you could be expelled. Not very many kids get swats or fail or are expelled. But it doesn't take many for the message to be heard. These few heavy losers are like severed heads displayed at the city gates to keep the populace in line.

The unwritten law of the land when it comes to instructors is: Tell the man what he wants to hear or he'll fail your ass out of the course! When a teacher says "jump", students jump. Even more discouraging than this master-slave approach to education is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of schooling for no reason. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Wow, can they follow orders!

Students don't ask that the orders they are given make sense. They've given up expecting things to make sense long before they leave elementary school. Things are true because the teacher says they're true. Your english teacher tells you a noun is a person, place or thing. So let it be. The important thing is to please her. Back in kindergarten, you found out teachers only love children who’d stand in nice straight lines. And that's where it's been at ever since.

What could possibly explain what we see in a freshman class? Is it a slave mentality? We are obliging on the surface but hostile and resistant underneath. Students vary in their awareness of what's going on. Some recognize their own put-on for what it is worth and even let their rebellion break through to the surface now and then. Others -- including most of the "good students" -- have been more deeply brainwashed. They swallow the crap with greedy mouths. They honest-to-God believe in grades, in busy work, in General Education requirements.

College entrance requirements tend to screen out the rebels. Not entirely, of course. Some students are expert con artists who know perfectly well what's happening. They want the diploma and spend their years in the penitentiary alternately laughing and cursing as they play the game. If their egos are strong enough, they cheat a lot. And, of course, even when they are angry down deep somewhere, it comes out in passive rather than active aggression. Frequent spells of laziness makes them misread simple questions. They spend their night mechanically outlining and highlighting chapters while meticulously failing to comprehend a single word of what's in front of them.

My question here would be; Why does the medium of education affect the freshmen so deeply while its purported content--the subject matter--so often slips their minds? I believe this is partly because the content varies from year to year while the form remains more or less the same. But also, the form--a structure of rules, punishments, rewards--affects us directly in a real way, while the subject matter may have no such immediate grasp on our lives. After all, don't we tend to learn best what matters most? Under a coercive system it isn't really the subject that matters. What matters is pleasing the authorities. These two are far from being one in the same.

Finally, there's the darkest reason of all for the master-slave approach to education. For one thing, damn little education takes place in colleges. How could it? You can't educate slaves, you can only train them. Or, to use an even uglier and more timely word, you can only program them.

Students don't get emancipated when they graduate. As a matter of fact, we don't let them graduate until they've demonstrated their willingness -- over 16 years -- to remain slaves. And for important jobs, like teaching, we make them go through more years just to make sure.

Educational oppression is trickier to fight than any other form of oppression. If you're a terrorist, they can't exile you. They either have to intimidate you or kill you. But in high school or college they can just bounce you out of the fold. And they do. Rebel students and renegade faculty members get smothered or shot down with devastating accuracy. Others get tired of fighting and voluntarily leave the system.

Students have immense unused power. They could, theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make academic freedom bilateral. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love and admiration, rather than fear and respect, and to lay down their weapons. Students could discover community. And they could learn to dance by dancing on the scantron cards. They could raze one set of walls and let life come blowing into the classroom. They could raze another set of walls and let education flow out and flood the streets. They could turn the classroom into where it's at -- a field of action. And believe it or not, they could study eagerly and learn prodigiously for the best of all possible reasons -- their own reasons.

They could, Theoretically. They have the power. If history has taught us one thing, for students, as for any oppressed group of people, the hardest battle isn't with the enemy, It's with what enemy has done to your mind