High School Valedictory Address

[Bud Struggle]

A bit off topic but an excellent look at how High Schoolers look at today's world.


snippet

"I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared."

http://americaviaerica.blogspot.com/

[#FF0000]

This owns, especially that bit you posted here.

[RGacky3]

Its funny that highschool kids understand alianation of labor as if its almost second nature, but businiessmen and freemarketeers can't undestand (or refuse to) to save their life.

The American school system needs to be reformed, it sucks for kids, it sucks for teachers. I actually learned a lot in highschool, because I read a lot on my own, in a way I could say I learnt a lot dispite highschool. I could go off on the American school system all day.

I really feel for kids today, its much much much worse then when I was in highschool, the outlook is much bleaker, the world more injust and terrible, and kids are going out of highschool nower into a society so corporatized and so inhuman they have nothing to hold on to, then they take drugs, then they get violent, then they get depressed, its gotten to the point where children are already being marketed too, and even more marketed to in highschool, the way marketing works is it goes to the lowest common demoninator, and thus you have a bunch of kids comming out of highschool already demoralized and sinical (something which usually happens YEARS later).

[Conquer or Die]

There seems to me to be only way to reform the school system, and that's to make it performance based.

Locking kids up for six hours of the day isn't going to produce results either economically or socially or morally or whatever. All it's going to do is produce wasted time and wasted lives.

Why not have the school hours operating on a 9-5 basis? Let high performers and those who do well have the option to leave school once their work is completed, those who don't do well should have to sit in at study halls and further lecture sessions in order to get it. Highly motivated students who want to participate in clubs, advanced academic college prep classes, tradeskill classes, art electives, athletics and the like can do so. Students who need additional practice and mentoring or motivation will get that. Students who want no part of the school culture will simply have to pass standard exams and can spend a larger part of their free-time doing whatever it is they want too, whether it be working an extra hour or two for income or playing Grand Theft Auto.

Sadly I think that (as with healthcare) we might devolve to a corporate structure for schools. I imagine that school vouchers will eventually replace public schooling and this will produce corporate owned schools who are interested in cold efficiency and the dumbing down in the learning process for the mechanisms of consuming and producing for a master. I think this will lead to class and social based antagonism and produce problems for pluralistic society.

I think that governmental teacher unions are partly to blame for the situation as well. While they have many valid concerns they also have significant responsibilities. I think a clear medium hurdle should be the method for accountability, with some flexibility as to the different situations presented.

[RGacky3]

I think that governmental teacher unions are partly to blame for the situation as well. While they have many valid concerns they also have significant responsibilities. I think a clear medium hurdle should be the method for accountability, with some flexibility as to the different situations presented.

No they are not, if it was'nt for the teachers unions the state would be only answering to the military industrial complex and those sort of interests, the fact is education is grossly underfunded, and teachers are grossly underpaid.


There seems to me to be only way to reform the school system, and that's to make it performance based.

Locking kids up for six hours of the day isn't going to produce results either economically or socially or morally or whatever. All it's going to do is produce wasted time and wasted lives.

Why not have the school hours operating on a 9-5 basis? Let high performers and those who do well have the option to leave school once their work is completed, those who don't do well should have to sit in at study halls and further lecture sessions in order to get it. Highly motivated students who want to participate in clubs, advanced academic college prep classes, tradeskill classes, art electives, athletics and the like can do so. Students who need additional practice and mentoring or motivation will get that. Students who want no part of the school culture will simply have to pass standard exams and can spend a larger part of their free-time doing whatever it is they want too, whether it be working an extra hour or two for income or playing Grand Theft Auto.


Thats not at all what the student was talking about, it was essencially an attack on Capitalism and how the school system is made for Capitalism.

[Bud Struggle]

Of course you realize the quickest way out of this situation for this guy is to become a Capitalist. There he would have the freedom to be an adventurer and explorer and everything else he wanted to be.

And actually, his education prepaired him very well for that--he just doesn't know it yet. :)

[#FF0000]

Of course but then she'd make a living perpetuating the system that makes alienation and squandering potential necessary.

It's a girl btw.

[Bud Struggle]

Of course but then she'd make a living perpetuating the system that makes alienation and squandering potential necessary. Let her hit another home run in college (a good college) and she'll be prime meat for Goldman Sachs. A million bucks a year will tame the angry "alienation beast" in her to be sure.

Now figure a way to get her on your side. She's half way there--but the further she goes in education--money will become a greater interest. Let her rack up $100,000 in college bills and Capitalism owns here.

She and people like her should be Communism's recruits not the general 17yo Stalinsts that seem to inhabit this place. She's "worth" 10.000 WalMart union guys.

How are you going to sell her?





It's a girl btw. Sorry. :(

[Drace]

This is awesome, but it doesn't reflect at all on most students. All the valedictorian speeches I seen are painfully boring and repetitive and sound like the same dull shit.

They all go like this "We completed a great chapter in our live and are ready to move on to greatness. All those hours spent working hard, staying home to do homework instead of going out with friends, is now paying off...blablalbalblabl"

[Bud Struggle]

This is awesome, but it doesn't reflect at all on most students. All the valedictorian speeches I seen are painfully boring and repetitive and sound like the same dull shit.

They all go like this "We completed a great chapter in our live and are ready to move on to greatness. All those hours spent working hard, staying home to do homework instead of going out with friends, is now paying off...blablalbalblabl"

Of course--those people will become Proletarians. This woman will become a Capitalist.

See the difference. :D

[#FF0000]

in my experience valedictorians usually get into some mundane professional career other than business

EDIT: I can't type goddamn

[Bud Struggle]

in my experience valedictorians usually get into some mundane professional career other than business

EDIT: I can't type goddamn

They need to go Ivy or some other national school--state universities are pretty much worthless. The big jobs always go to the "best educated."

[Drace]

Of course--those people will become Proletarians. This woman will become a Capitalist.

See the difference.

You haven't changed at all, and that's a bad thing :lol:http://www.revleft.com/vb/../revleft/smilies/biggrin.gif

[Bud Struggle]

You haven't changed at all, and that's a bad thing :lol:http://www.revleft.com/vb/../revleft/smilies/biggrin.gif

You Communists can't just feed me straight lines and not expect me to get off a good zinger now and then. :D

[RGacky3]

Of course--those people will become Proletarians. This woman will become a Capitalist.

See the difference.

Probably not, very few people make it, and that type of thinking does'nt help either.


She and people like her should be Communism's recruits not the general 17yo Stalinsts that seem to inhabit this place. She's "worth" 10.000 WalMart union guys.

How are you going to sell her?

She's not worth 10,000 WalMart union guys, she might end up a WalMart union girl, communism's recruits arn't the 17to Stalininsts, for the most part they are millions of working class people worldwide, and even a few top guys with a consience (theres not many of them).

[Raúl Duke]

communism's recruits arn't the 17to Stalininsts, for the most part they are millions of working class people worldwide, and even a few top guys with a consience (theres not many of them).
I think he's referring to revleft's seemingly "main audience"....

which is relative...revleft ain't the world and stalinism is a dead-fish in reality in certain areas of the world..

[Dean]

I think that governmental teacher unions are partly to blame for the situation as well. While they have many valid concerns they also have significant responsibilities. I think a clear medium hurdle should be the method for accountability, with some flexibility as to the different situations presented.

It has always been the teachers' unions which opposed further regimentation of the school system. They're hardly to blame.

[Peace on Earth]

This was at my school. :thumbup1:

The sad part is most students either don't care either way about the system or are too far indoctrinated to realize the inherent flaws, which leads a majority of students (and adults) to brushing the speech off as nothing more than the ranting of someone who had a bone to pick with the system, instead of a legitimate argument against the system.

[Adi Shankara]

They need to go Ivy or some other national school--state universities are pretty much worthless.

Now hold on, Rutgers, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Chapel Hill, and University of Michigan--Ann Arbor easily rank amongst the top universities in the world...how can you even say that?

[IcarusAngel]

Bud Struggle, please! George Bush went to Yale with a 550 score on his SATs and poor grades at Andover. Bill Buckley, another politician, only had 480 on the verbal portion, yet went to Princeton and won a Rhodes Scholarship. These "Ivy League" schools are more about who you know. The late Paul Wellstone also did horrible on his SATs and went on to get a Ph.D in political science and became a progressive senator.

Francis Collins, on the other hand, was home-schooled, never followed a formal curriculum, and is head of the human genome project. Craig Venter got his start at a community college and ended up groundbreaking research in biochemistry. Einstein, Edison, Chomsky, etc. also had unusual schooling situations. (Chomsky started out at a progressive school, went to a normal high school, then had a class by class basis at University where he was awarded his Ph.D because it was found that he was exceptionally brilliant. He then went on to form a mathematical and scientific basis for linguistics.) I think Russell as well was homeschooled for a while.

Unless you mean people who become "great" by pushing papers around that no one will even remember in 10 years then you are incorrect.


Many great things were invented at public universities like sockets at Berkeley and at the University of Utah many early advancements in computer graphics and so on were invented.

All that said, John Taylor Gatto is a libertarian (even though he notes that our modern schooling system was shaped by the capitalists) who purposes not progressive education but pure homeschooling. This raises more problems that it will solve, especially now-a-days, where working together is so essential for science etc.


What is intelligence anyway?

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/WIIA.html

[Bud Struggle]

Now hold on, Rutgers, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Chapel Hill, and University of Michigan--Ann Arbor easily rank amongst the top universities in the world...how can you even say that?

Nothing wrong with state schools--it's just that the investment bankers in NYC usually pick from the Ivys or schools in the North East. There are other schools--I went to Georgetown which is pretty close to being in the class.

[Left-Reasoning]

All that said, John Taylor Gatto is a libertarian (even though he notes that our modern schooling system was shaped by the capitalists) who purposes not progressive education but pure homeschooling.

Unschooling is the way of the future.

[RGacky3]

Unschooling is the way of the future.

You a fan of Genn Beck? Sounds like it.

I suppose the best education for a kid would be living on the street, according to that theory.

[Aloysius]

The big jobs always go to the "best educated."
The "best educated" in money-grubbing universities and slave-factories.
Fuck college, I'm getting a library card.

[Bud Struggle]

The "best educated" in money-grubbing universities and slave-factories.
Fuck college, I'm getting a library card.

that's why I put "best educated" quotes. It was meant to be scarcastic. :)

[ZeroNowhere]

You a fan of Genn Beck? Sounds like it.

I suppose the best education for a kid would be living on the street, according to that theory.You would be best off doing some research on what you are talking about before talking about it.

[RGacky3]

I've read about it.