mr pickl’s surpries {and mine}

Loose & frazzled threads of American schooling

Mr. Pickl had been janitor of the school
for a long, long tiem. The old janitor
luved the children. And aull the children
luved him.

One dæ after scool, when aull the
children had gon, Mr Pickl was wurking
in the first-græd rwm. A culored peece of
of pæper under the desk caut his ie. As he
picked it up, he red whot was on it.

Birthdæ Party
   Lots of cæk
  Ice Cream
   Soda

“A birthdæ party,” he said tw
himself. His ies lit up as he thaut of the
happy tiems he and the children aulwæs
had at these partis. “But,” he thaut,
“hwm is it for? And it dusn’t sæ when
it’s tw be.” The invitæƒhon wasn’t…

This is my school primer.
How grade school Jonathan was taught to read and write. I’m still recovering from our British-dominated American-colored education system, so here I hope to explain my poor excuse for grammar, ongoing error-prone prose, and congenital almost-spelled-right pun-seeking: This is how they made me.

My son showed early promise with vocabulary and math skills, but by the end of two years of Core Curriculum, he was turned off and frustrated with math, and I was too.
I had a math road-bump in grade-school around math, but geometry and ratios drew me through more science than equations. My trouble started when school had me notate equations different than my mom taught, told it was The New Math. Except it was never the same for each generation with teachers giving whole-new methods even between siblings. I grew frustrated and teachers’ angry, shutting me down with public sham behaviors, cementing my ‘tude so I avoided math until college. There, in Structures, learning about physics forces and numbers to calculate loads that I realized the emotional knots remaining. It wasn’t until years later and from daily use of math in my own business and life that all this anxiety and stress evaporated.
Is the Gibson line congenitally number-deficient? Doubtful.

Perhaps our school system isn’t what it is presented as? Maybe there are other goals sought by methods not so obvious?
Those Americans born during or just-after Boomers like me were subject to the greatest generation of aptitude tests and battery of psyche-measuring gauntlets, more than any generation before, or since. Think of it as the low-intensity MKUltra fever made palatable & sweeping the nation. Huge tracts of our schooling were spent on paper versions of ‘jumping puzzles’ for administrators, and suits in DC.

Whatever the psycho-metricians sought and gathered back then, testing since has settled to surveillance centered around police-state tracking aberrant, or politically-useful, characters for exploit more than helping you identify your strengths or find new places in society. The Hoover-era snitch-networks that economist Michael Hudson lectures growing up under shows High School civics & economic teachers, your coaches and counselors, were all writing up FBI reports on you and your friend-networks, but has been supplanted by silent, nobody-watching/nobody-tattling, cybernetic systems auto-magically sorting today’s kids out with full-spectrum personality reporting. So, are we better society if State reduces ethically-compromised adult role-model choices {thought-police as crass and cynical as any soviet ‘crat}, but secret control has expanded into medication, your biology, or recently added, biofield?

The question, Why? How can education function when each generation, even within siblings, is taught confusion? What ends are served by fostering mis-communication, distrust fostering resentment, or doubts about voracity, between generations? What is the point of four generations now of American youth mocking elders and shown to ‘know more’ about what is important than adults in Hollywood families?

What goals are served when fathers’ cannot show sons how to measure / estimate best-costs and cuts for a project, becasue they use different words, and notation, essentially a new alphabet, unable to pass useful just-folks wisdom, because school insists to kids that mom and dad are old, slow, not-thinking ‘modern’. Not thinking ‘right’. I’m reminded of why I detest Dilbert for smug audience laughter at his Catch-22 ‘lessons’ of the business/office world. Sure, the Boss looks stupid and plebs feel righteous that some point-or-other was made, somewhere, kinda-sorta… but Boss still banks those bucks. Scott Adams punks his audience giving a Feel, but the true lesson is Back To Work for The Man. Likewise, our scholarship honorifics all the way up to Nobel are designed to supplant natural intrinsic knowledge or wisdom and bow to authority.

How’s it worked out?

Fifty percent of XXIst Americans, not immigrants, read at sixth grade level and are functionally illiterate. America slowed funding infrastructure; bridges, high-speed rail, education and stopped promoting education in the 1980’s as Cold War was winding down completely dried up once factories moving overseas. This is impoverishment of the nation mentally, morally, and economically. Look around, do your own research, see what you think is crashing people’s frontal-lobes into their hind-brains - for generations now. This is mis-leadership on a grand civilizational scale.

The Burn Baby, Burn ‘tude.
Our global system was setup by men of skill and power with networks and agendas no longer operating, because they are all dead. Their feckless Princes now wrestle over tarnished levers/scepters of power with con-artist hanger-ons massing for another attack on our Constitution. Because their true plans and values remained hidden to avoid counter-movements & rebellion, generations of otherwise willing minions no longer maintain skills {or interest} for these networks, even seeing The System as harming them. Americans can accept greed and avarice at the top, but abuse & harms below has limits that do not respect bank accounts, or pedigree, or bunkers.

Time for change: Our institutions are corrupted beyond any romantic ideas of salvage the Bret Weinstein crowd pines for. Ask your nearest Fortune 500 ‘xec if fresh-minted Ivy League candidates are even on their shopping list, but that answer won’t be shown on MSNBC. Whole swaths of physics were ‘outlawed’ decades ago by Feds as revealed by Marc Andreeson this summer. The monied corruptions around centralized medicine and corporate food have everything to do with America’s terrible health status.
Save America : start a new school. It is certain that Wall Street & DC will never capitalize a rival education system threatening powers-that-be. It’s up to us. To my friends and colleagues who made some money in tech, or media, or science, and wonder what to do about any of this.
Let’s talk.