The Real American Education by Duane Locke

THE REAL AMERICAN EDUCATION
by Duane Locke

EDUCATION

I was born
With eyes
That could see
Trees.

My hired teachers
Worked hard
To teach me
To see lumber.

Duane Locke,
From Yang Chu’s Poems


The real ideal of real American education is to assembly-line produce high salaried slave mentalities to make profits for billionaires.

This prevalent ideal, like all practical, utilitarian, and instrumental attitudes, limits, restricts, reduces, and destroys the most valuable parts of perceptive potential, and thus robotizes the human being and truncates his or her humanity. It might be said that our educational system is mutilating people into humanistic blindness, for with its practical, utilitarian, instrumental aims that diminishes the aesthetic, emotive, sensuous, and intellectual possibilities.

This ideal did not remain an ivory towerist’s day dream, but became the actuality underlying the experiential functioning of American education. Its efficacy has produced a population of slave mentalities, I-they’s, inauthentic human beings. The success of this ideal has been astounding. So we have a nation of supposedly educated citizens who have volunteered to be slave mentalities, intellectual-aesthetic weaklings and iPod puppets.

The dehumanization that our American education has achieved is remarkable. Baudrillard has supplied us with profiles and portraits of the simulacra that have replaced human beings. This degeneracy has even polluted the Humanities. This discipline once dedicated to producing an elite human being, a person of excellent erudition, excellent sensibility, excellent empathy, is now a lickspittle to the new ignorance, popular opinion and popular culture, and to the Freshman English essay designed to serve the billionaire dominated community by training the student to cultivate a plain monosyllabic style with a modicum of cumulative clauses. T. S. Eliot’s hollow man is now a distinguished professor of the Humanities. Robots, dehumanized professor of Humanities, produce robots to serve the billionaire.

Karl Capek did not foresee that human beings would study hard, make extraordinary sacrifices, to turn themselves into robots.

The progressive and rapid deterioration and degeneration of humanity that has resulted from our real American education is abetted and perpetuated by such malefactors as Business Administration Departments, which may be cited as the storm troopers of the real American education, in their advanced and expert techniques to transform human beings into obedient robots. These instrumental, and utility-minded soldiers, close-ordered drilled by an abstract and apparitional commander, money and encouraged by egregious popular axiological trends with the covert purpose to murder humanity and deaden what little is left of philosophical intellectualism and artistic creation. The price tag on a painting of Van Gogh is what is
worthwhile, not the painting itself. These money-fodder soldiers, these victims of majority opinion and the status quo have been by their acceptances of the exploitative and commodification life styles have become so mechanized, lobotomized that they have lost all insight into what constitutes human behavior, and thus are completely ignorant, unaware of the destruction of humanity that their behavior and beliefs are achieving. These “soldiers” are so stupid that have not the least insight into their malicious and cruel behavioral existences.



The above military-imitation force in our real education systems has their camp followers in the Education Department, these lackeys who love slogans and bumper stickers that advocate plebian and hoi polloisms with such wisdom as “Aim for the middle group.” These proud weaklings are very commonplace in our educational system, and all seem to aspire to be orators, and vociferously proclaim even when one no one is present, “I follow the educational ideals of Cicero,” Cicero of whose philosophy they have no real understanding. A few to advertise themselves as upholder of the American way of life and display their disdain of European and Ancient values, shout “I follow the educational ideals of Emerson.” Of course, these Emersonians have only read about three paragraphs of Emerson’s writing, but these slave mentalities are constantly repeating the words, “self reliance.”

The scientific segment of Real American Education naturally harmonizes with the covert ideal of producing high salaried slave
mentalities to make profits for billionaires. The scientific trains the mind to produces a special color of red for BMW roadsters, thus providing the narcotic of illusion for high salaried slave mentalities, or bombs that kill more economically and efficiently and thus force countries to cooperate in making profits for the oil and other industrial type billionaires.

A slave mentality can now get a PH. In plastics, and have the illusion he is intelligent and educated.

The scientific has also contributed to simple minds who crave simple fantasies advertised to be a new truth that is so mathematically complex, so beyond the familiar and everyday, that these fantasies surpasseth human understanding. Theses fantasies are often altered and revised from Newton through Einstein on down to Quantum physics. We are now being supplied with Chaos theories and fractals. These new temporary fantasies are already being used by superficial poetaster to form a base for new poetic ideologies as a meta-narrative for an ersatz poetry in our age of Real American education stillborn poetry. So the scientific has not only provided superficial aesthetic surfaces for underprivileged artistic minds, but lethal weapons to protect the global industries of the billionaire profit-makers.

The most pitiable of our educational disciplines is the English Department, especially in small private liberal arts college, although their sickness extends through out the Real American educational system. Members of this discipline were once dedicated, or at least it was rumored they were, to the humanizing of the homo sapien, but now seeking a small salary raise, tenure, and a new title that brings petty prestige, they have joined in the robotization of the human being. One of the most spoken sentence among this ilk is “American business is now seeking to employ Liberal Arts graduates.” The rationale is that the Liberal arts graduate can use his or her linguistic skills to manipulate and exploit to make a profit for billionaires.

The classification “Liberal Arts” has became a signifier without a signified. Our manipulative, billionaire-lickspittle politicians have turned the word “Liberal” into a pejorative term, and most of these influential manipulators of language are too philosophically ignorant to understand what it being talked about when a person is condemned as being a “Liberal,” but in our age of revered and honored quackery, due to the influence of Real American education, these ignorant and manipulative politicians are elected to office by people rendered stupid slave mentalities by our Real American Education system.

The only course in the English Department that is respected by the slave mentalities is Freshman English that deemphasizes imaginative literature and stressed and stresses the regimen of correct spelling and the monosyllabic writing without any cumulative sentences of business reports or job applications.

Shakespearce is tolerated if he is made practical. The methods of Iago’s convincing Othello can be converted into methods to sell products.

Now, this social determination, this covert feeling hidden inside most people who are not personally conscious the feeling exists and is potent within their neural corporeal network, this feeling that the purpose of real American education is the assembly-line production of slave mentality to make profits for billionaires, this feeling that has turned most of our citizens into slave mentalities and inauthentic humans, obeying a code accepted without awareness or understanding, is a code spoken into them verbally and subvocally by other slave mentalities, is concealed and insidious, and difficult to recognize and to understand. The social forces that emanate from this attitude are so familiar and habitual that they exists as a dominant power that is detrimental to the development of one’s humanity and the concomitant happiness, eudemonia, that accompanies such a development, and yet the victims, those who whose weak and receptive temperaments volunteered to be slave mentalities, are totally unaware of their condition of weakness and the monstrosities resultant from their enslavement, the monstrosities that have resulted covertly in our civilization of monstrosities in which empathy is absent and cruelty, the exploitation to man, animals, and nature is overlooked, advocated, and practiced.

The powers, as the power of most beliefs and ideologies, comes from the fact that what is believed has no actual existence as an empirical here, but only has force as being a conceptualization of a non-existence. The attitude in actually a not here, but become a conceptual here through a faith as faith replaces evidence. In other words, the attitude is composed of signifieds without signifiers. In the determination of social behavior lies are more powerful than truth. The quotidian citizen speaks a language of lies, and lives by these lies.

Neither more money or an improvement in methods, but only a change in individuals, can remove the harm our current education is doing in destroying authentic human beings. As long as most individual’s behavior is determined by a covert belief that the ideal of education is the assembly-line production of high salaried slave mentalities to make profits for billionaires we will have this destructive educational system and our society of monstrosity. Everyone must change their lives, their slave mentality lives, if we are to have progress in education.



Author bio:

Duane Locke lives by an ancient oak, an underground stream, and an osprey’s home in rural Lakeland, Florida. A 400 page book of his poems, YANG CHU’s POEMS, was published in April, 2009 by the Canadian publisher, Crossing Chaos. He was also a featured poet and Interviewed in Constance Stadler and Antony Hitchen’s “Eviscerator Heaven, #4. Duane has had 6,337 poems published in print magazines and e zines. For further information, he advises you to click “Duane Locke” on Google Search, where there are 465,000 entries.