On Education

I have hated the education system for approximately 10 years now. I don’t know when or why I started hating it. I don’t hate it enough to ruin my life over it of course so probably hate is too strong a word. I dislike it. A couple of months ago I was super inspired by someone who possessed the exact attitude all employers seek and yet demonstrated clearly that VCE and its counterparts fail to identify the best possible people to enter the work force.
The person in particular was blessed by having identified what they were passionate about in life and what they really wanted to do which was nursing, and because of a learning disability was having a hard time (one that I can’t even conceive of resitting VCE) getting into a nursing course. She told a large group of people she got an enter of 39 (I think I can’t recall exactly) and how proud she was of that result because she was proud of all the work that went into achieving it. I would much rather have an attitude like that than get a shitty Academic Achievement award in front of students that have never heard of me as a marketing exercise for prospective parents.
On the other end of the spectrum sits me. I’m ashamed of my attitude to some extent. I got 95.5 and I think more than anything else its just a big fucking joke. VCE was a joke to me. I don’t profess to be a genius either that ala Good Will Hunting sneaks into mathematics classrooms and completes Harvard Standard equations with my eyes closed. In 2001 I set myself 3 guidelines. I wasn’t going to get an Enter in the 90’s. I wouldn’t study more than 5 hours a week. I would always be in bed by 9.30 on a weeknight. I was a serial procrastinator, I had no respect for the education system and believed that SACS worked to my advantage as under the CATS system I actually would have been competing against people willing to put in the hours outside of class time.
And I was set. Going to a private school the one competitive advantage that outweighs all the others is the photo copy budget. That and being pressured into doing the classes that received the most generous scaling I was rigged to sit on the sunny side of the bell-curve. I had a phone book full of past exams. It wasn’t about knowledge it was about criteria. The exams were all designed to measure certain things and all you had to do was demonstrate you could do them. There were only a few ways to ask if you knew how to calculate the acceleration of a body falling towards the earth. My maths teacher said if you do a million questions chances are your not going to see a question you haven’t been asked before. In reality you really only needed to do 5 questions or so for something as not brilliant as the VCE system. I don’t want to sound condescending, its why my lack of appreciation for my enter shames me. If I could sell the surplus 10 points that I didn’t need to get into my course on e-bay I would have because I know how devastating and restricting and difficult VCE can be for a lot of decent people.
So really I don’t hate Education itself as a concept. The education system parades itself as this fantasy that its function is to pass on knowledge. It isn’t it’s a supply demand market function. A profession that is in high demand (doctors, lawyers) doesn’t have sufficient resources to actually supply that demand and so you put in place a system who’s function isn’t to educate but in fact to discriminate adequately between the student population so that Universities can form a basis to accept some students into their courses and reject others. That is the primary reason VCE exists. Which I have two problems with: 1. It claims to be something it isn’t which has damaging ramifications on peoples self esteem and sense of self worth. 2. It isn’t done very well.
If you check a VTAC guide you’ll find very few courses that have more prerequisites than a study score of 25 in English. This means the same scale (Enter) to determine if you are a good Economist is the same as the scale used to determine if you will be a good Chiropractor. I applaud introductions like the UMAT test for the medical profession which at least acknowledges that there is more to being good doctor/dentist/nurse material than your ability to sit exams and takes into account people skills etc. But most courses don’t do this. I don’t need my 95.5 whatever the fuck its meant to tell people about me to do my course, I can’t really imagine you’d need more than a 20 to do my course I can’t see why everyone from my highschool wouldn’t be able to do marketing except for the fact that they wouldn’t fit in the lecture theatre and scheduling tutorials would be a nightmare.
As such I know in my course (and don’t know about others) that a lot of people can pass subjects and have no idea what they are doing to embarrassing levels. (ie. People can’t define some of the most central concepts such as brand equity, the value of a brand in the consumers mind as owned by the company) by their senior year.
As for self esteem I always found submitting essays, assignments and sitting tests undignified and insulting that fucking teachers would presume to tell me how good or bad I was. I had a very close relationship with my Studio Art teacher and never is the fallacy of criteria more exposed in art where 12 artists had to have their ‘art’ an undefinable concept in itself discriminated out and ranked. I tried to get out of school and books and classes what I could and considered that the learning function of attending school. Completeing assessment pieces was a humiliation a had to suffer because the school asked it of me and I wasn’t dumb enough to not see the advantages of getting myself a decent enter score. As such though because I availed no respect to the system I never felt like I was 68% intelligent because I got 68 out of 100 on a test. But some people do. For the record my best friend got 99.95 I don’t think he’s smarter than me. He certainly had a particular genius that was well suited to VCE as he picked up languages easily and was very good at maths. He became a med student which has very little use for specialist maths and slightly more for languages depending on which suburb you end up practicing in. I think I could chew up and spit out a lot of people who got higher scores than me and a high enter certainly doesn’t prevent you from being cleaned up in a car accident or making a dumb decision like trying out heroin. My other best friend got an enter I never found out but it wasn’t enough to get him into the course he was aiming for. He had to take the long way round. I know for a fact he can chew up and spit out just about everyone I know and is now heading up a rapidly growing radio station and is a n all around star, I don’t know a single person who has achieved more off his own bat at our age.
My Ex came round before Christmas last year because she was upset over her thesis results (79%) and her esteem had taken a blow because someone she knew had just got an amazing enter that was higher than the one she got 5 years previously. To her credit rationally she knew not to worry but her feelings were under attack. I tried to hold in my disgust. We dated for three years and I never knew she would pander so to someone else’s criteria. She is a smart girl with a lot to offer and I had assumed she was above the primitive obey the authority figure disposition. She had a higher enter score than mine that she was intensely proud of where I treated mine as a bit of currency that could buy my way into a course, a direct market transaction. I hope she isn’t reading this but I never thought my Ex was smarter than me. I believe she will do great things but in a leadership seminar I sat through I believe the guy who was doing it hit the nail on the head and my applling attitude to something as sacred as VCE came clear.
He asked ‘What do leaders all have in common?’ I think I said ‘moustaches’ or something like that but the answer was ‘They never fail.’ Which you immediately want to contradict but he is ultimately right leaders only have setbacks, they are persistent. They don’t give up. Failure is something imposed on an individual by the rest of society. It is the desire to accept a common criteria which is as false as a universal truth.
I learnt for me and thought the marks put on my essays was the opinion of a group of pencil dick fuck-heads sitting on a committee somewhere, and I got very good marks (again what is very good?) A getting 79% on a thesis (in particularly bad circumstances too) you should be proud of anyway otherwise your greed for recognition needs addressing B if your not happy with your work just identify whats wrong with it because isn’t learning about knowledge even if you cant get it marked again C if you submit to someone elses criteria you can fail, but if you are truly passionate about something you can never be told who is right or wrong.
So if you want good grades send me stuff now I’ll grade it for you I’ll try my best to tell you how dumb or smart you are. I could probably wrangle my way onto the VCE governing board you know, me who likes Dolly Parton and is sexually aroused by anything associated with ducks.
The girl with the low enter who IS becoming a nurse I have no doubt is and always will be a true leader because she persists, respects herself and takes pride in every mark she gets. The girl who got 79% on her thesis could go either way in my opinion, she has so much potential to change the world but feels shame for every mark she doesn’t get and possibly puts too much stock in institutionalised criteria which is a big fucking joke because she does development and would have been writing essays for 3 years about how inadequate the HDI, GNP and GPI are as criteria to measure a nations development and progress yet didn’t stand back and look at the archaic academic criteria as having the same problem when books like Emotional Intelligence and the complex plethora of new Education theories are being taken up by passionate, inspiring dedicated teachers in the face of the market function that is VCE, HSC and whatever they use in primitive Queensland.
If I had got a 39 enter my mother would have cried and wailed in grief and been inconsolable due to her pathalogical fear of us being poor like she was. For that I think my mother is a failure in that particular part of her life and she is a teacher and a damn good one too (she certainly doesn’t put the same criteria on her students) I forgot to change my preferences because I was too busy drinking and partying and too lazy to log onto a computer. It worked out very well for me, but it was a pretty stupid thing to do.
My dad said to me ‘Once again the McC’s have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory’ which I still think is a great saying and reminds me to be responsible.
I will tell my kids every day ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you what you are worth.’