An Education

Instead of telling schools and teachers what to do, some Americans need to spend time learning from them. They would find that the roots of the current state of America were on clear view in any local middle-class high school trying to educate the children of 'Boobus Americanus' for the past 30 years. These roots had nothing whatever to do with secular humanism, sex education, dumbing down the curriculum, or low national test scores.

Starting in about 1972, we graduated a generation that learned from the media and their parents that getting high was a norm. The parents who already smoked dope generally thought the schools should stop getting all upset about stoned kids. For example (in my school at the time) the football player smoking a joint in the back of the team bus was a typical case. The coach suspended him; but,the parents got the suspension overturned so the team could try to win a big game. After all, kids will be kids! At about this same time, the Vince Lombardi crap that “winning...it's the only thing!” was invading the mentality of all high school sports. At this time, the contests of quasi-gladitorial professional football thugs had supplanted baseball as the 'national past time”. People were amused by, but apparently did not learn from the satire of George Carlin! Also at this time, my own generation began its romance with money, at the same time that my students' parents began making a lot of it. The new attitude was exactly the one that the military-industrial complex of the '50s and '60s had dreamed of creating. You see, they had lost the social revolution, but they had learned from their defeat... and from the mafia. “Can't persuade them? Buy them all! Every person has their price. Make them an offer they can't refuse!

I saw my first “he who dies with the most toys, wins!” bumper sticker at about this time. A new generation entered high school with a new attitude toward education itself: it's for suckers ! Life is about football, fucking, and free-time. The media fed this narcissism. “Animal House” became the portrait of why anybody would want to go to college. The “term” intellectual” stopped being heard in schools or in public life. The era of the glorification of the thug was coming: mafiosi, gang-bangers, super-heroes, and the super rich guy in the Bimmer with the trophy blondes. “Pretty Woman” was real, and nobody really liked Fredo after all... By the time it appeared, kids didn't even buy the message of the movie with Michael Douglas playing the Gekko tycoon. They envied Gekko, not the Capra-esque ending in which truly good guys won. They liked Darth far better than Luke. They giggled hysterically when Indiana shrugged and shot the sword-wielding Arab guy (and now, whose still laughing???)

In classes, these students had a new anthem: do as little as you can but get into college; and from there, get rich fast and retire at 40 or even 35. Computer technology fed the new reality: you didn't even need to go to school if you could do computers. I had boys with tech skills refuse to do anything in or out of class; after all, they were going to get rich without school. School became a sort of rigged game-show challenge that all the kids winked at. Who could cheat without getting caught? Who could con their parents into bailing them out of or buying them out of any jam? Who could fuck more girls and not get any of them pregnant? Who could fuck more guys without getting pregnant? Who could con their parents into getting them not just a car, but a really cool new car? Tastes in music swung from rock to gangsta rap, and Frank Zappa was vindicated in the end: “Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit 'em in the ass!” 'Bling' started to appear glittering in the suburban hallways, as foolish little white boys pretended they might be in a gang. Winners were bullys; winners took what they needed; winners didn't care about “collateral damage,” but cared for their “bros” at the expense of all others.

Meanwhile the parents had learned that school was about demanding special treatment for their children (never mind earning or deserving that treatment). They were both busy making 10% on investments and flipping houses. Furious mothers complained to the principal when a teacher didn't return a phone call within the hour; fathers prefaced conferences by literally saying “do you know who I am”....as though that should actually matter. The old houses in the neighborhood started to be torn down; a 3-bedroom bungalow was now unthinkable. Now the right homes had three car garages and cedar-shake roofs. If a new kind of wine cooler appeared on “This Old House”, the parents had to have it. Lawn furniture, barbecues, and upscale kitchen cabinets, joined shoes and dresses in fashion cycles and constant shifts in acceptable colors. Kids knew that they would always have the newest phones, the latest MP3, and the latest $200 jeans. It became a mark of maturity for kids to spend money, not to save it, and to hang out rather than work. In the go-go economy all things and all people were now markets that needed to be marketed to.

Gen X and Gen Y came of age in a world of mandatory Ralph Lauren, Mercedes Benz, and designer clothes. To get these things, they had to have more and more; and so, the “I'm better than you because I spend more than you” attitude got applied to the business world. Get it, get it now, get it any way you can; you only need to show a quarterly gain and leverage that into a raise. Find the loopholes in the system and cheat it to your advantage. Young bosses rewarded the cheating of ever younger workers who all confessed to each other over beers in the corporate skybox what a joke school had been and what chumps the WW2 generation were. They were tired of hearing the Boomers rag about Viet Nam and social conscience. To hell with 'em! Business was now really about gaming (the new marketing spin for gambling). Some win the game, some lose the game, but always its a game and the goal is to BE the house: Lehman house, Goldman Sachs house, Fannie Mae house, CitiCorp house. Move the paper through the loopholes and never mind the regulator (teachers?) since they only envy us anyway and want a piece of their own. Everyone wants to participate in gaming, lottery dreams, six figure raises for doing next to nothing. Don't go into education....you'll have to grade papers and actually mentor kids! No, get into finance and investment banking, the new holy grails. Don't worry about journalists finding out what you are really doing each day at work....after all, they envy you too, and journalism is not abut truth seeking but now about niche marketing, ...which is to say finance and banking.

And....should you get caught, or the whole thing go sour, make sure that with your last breath, while they are re-possessing the Bimmer, find a way to make sure those God damn teachers lose their middle class salaries and 'guaranteed' pensions. Then we can still say, curled up in an evicted little ball in the driveway of the house we can't afford anymore, that they were wrong, and we were right, we were right, we were right.

Winning...it's the only thing! Learning....well, that comes a little later on .....