Brainsturbator Wants You….to drop outta school now
From the Desk of Thirtyseven:
I’ve been an “autodidact” my whole life --- a self-teacher. This is a mix of natural genetic disposition towards being curious, mixed with a swollen ego that prevents me from taking anyone else seriously. There are some things, like Magick or LSD, which I have found to be personally useful, but would not advocate to anyone else. Dropping out of school is definitely not one of them: this is for every human being on Earth.
Thanks to some highly invasive tracking software, we know that our audience is almost entirely over the age of 20, so this article will serve more as a re-examination of your past than a closer look at your daily reality. This post will probably be re-formatted into a .pdf pamphlet in the next week, so that interested readers can print out dozens of copies and give them out to kids at your local school. In the meantime, here is some history to chew on, and a rundown of valuable support resources for those interested in leaving the ideological prison camps we euphemistically refer to as “schools”.
(Also, for the curious reader who’s wondering what in the f**k is going on with the photo above, check out this link for the full story. Armed police—and even miltary—raids on public schools are much less rare than you’d like to think.)
It All Comes Down to Taking One Step
When I was 14, my hero was a rapper named KRS-One who dropped out of eighth grade and educated himself by reading and apprenticing in the music business. I informed my parents that I intended to do the same, and they told me it was illegal. Having spent all my life in schools where knowledge is measured out in tiny spoonfuls, I wasn’t resourceful enough to figure out they were wrong. And, in retrospect, I admit I was a little scared.
So I stayed in high school and then headed off to Oberlin College, but my desire to pursue other avenues of education persisted…
When I returned to Oberlin that fall, I realized that there were no courses covering the things I most wanted to learn. No sex classes. No friendship classes. No classes on how to build an organization, raise money, navigate a bureaucracy, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, ask the right questions, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what’s important. Those are the things that enhance or mess up people’s lives, not
whether they know economic theory or can analyze literature.
So I quit college and enrolled as a student at the University of Planet Earth, the world’s oldest and largest educational institution. It has billions of professors, tens of millions of books, and unlimited course offerings. Tuition is free, and everybody designs his or her own major.
Here’s my curriculum: Live in a different city every year. Attend a different place of worship every week. Seek out hundreds of mentors to help me find answers to my thousands of questions. Spend the rest of the time in the library and on the Internet. Create lists, make charts, and undertake the most ambitious projects I can think of. Create my own personal bible, almanac, and telephone book. Live in the poorest neighborhoods in order to learn how to get along in the world and to save money, so I can travel to a different continent each year.
I’m doing this for five years as a freshman survey course. Then I’ll have a better idea of what to pursue as a sophomore.
---from William Upski Wimsatt’s classic essay, How I Got My DIY Degree
US Public School: FAILURE BY DESIGN
What’s wrong with schools in the United States of America?
Answer: nothing at all. They produce ignorant and vicious people who are submissive to authority and bitterly resentful of other’s success, who are trapped in adolescence for the rest of their lives, who ritually and constantly consume worthless material goods to silence voices in their heads, who shuffle into meaningless jobs and mix drugs, alcohol, processed sugar and caffiene to make it through week after week until eventually succumbing to self-inflicted cancer. Does any of that sound exaggerated to you?
Although I’m 25 and we’re living post-Columbine, this is not a new critique. Witness H.L. Menken writing back in 1924:
What is the purpose of industrial education? To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence? Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States and that is its aim everywhere else.
If you don’t believe this development was part of the intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris’s The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.
”Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred,” writes Harris, ”are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom.” This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the “result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.” Scientific education subsumes the individual until his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we’ve had so far.
Further words from the deeply creepy Mr. Harris: “The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.”
(I won’t even get into the occult signifigance of that statement, but the curious reader might want to look into the occult signifigance of Mr. Harris himself.)
Class, Pay Attention
At this point in the “lesson”, take a break from being beaten about the head with quotes. Check out the NLP Section at the Brainsturbator Library, and download “Monsters and Magical Sticks”, by Stephen Heller. Consider the patterns and unconscious routines you still enact that you were trained for in school. Feel how your body changes when you imagine the police walking into the room you’re in right now and asking you questions.
From the Roots to the Fruit
In 1906 the Rockefeller Education Board blessed us with this whopper—a pity that today’s press releases aren’t as candid:
In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
Too funny, right? Don’t get us wrong, though, there’s a lot of great schools and even more great teachers out there. There are literally millions of good people working in the belly of the beast and making a larger difference than they know in the lives of the prisoners around them. This Bud is for you. Brainsturbator is jovially opposed to any binary UsVersusThemisms, and we’d like to take this opportunity to salute good cops, brave soldiers, and dedicated social workers. Just because the overall superorganism is destructive or even “evil”, don’t pass judgement on the component parts you meet on the road to 2012.
Even assholes have something to teach you, and even morons can be useful.
The Door Is Not Locked
For those interested in leaving school, we suggest the following:
The Teenage Liberation Handbook is the classic motherload. If anyone has this in pdf format, please send it to us so we can put it up on the Brainsturbator Library for everyone else. (This is true of any book you feel should be shared with our audience, by the way.)
The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, an essay by John Taylor Gatto, author of the outstanding work “An Underground History of American Education”, which I stole most of the quotes in this post from.
Not only am I an autodidact, I’m downright autoerotic, so let me toot-toot my own horn and recommend some recent Brainsturbator posts designed for this precise purpose:
Evolutionary resources, volume one
Evolutionary resources, volume two
And a post on The World Game of Buckminster Fuller.
And for the third time in this post, Brainsturbator Library, yo.
Recommended Reading
- Worldchanging by Alex Steffen
- The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Ellix Katz
- Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J. Carroll
- Coup d’Etat by Edward N. Luttwak
For more recommendations please visit our Store.
- Psychic Warfare from 1981-2008
- Bucky Fuller & his World Game: Intro to Saving Planets
- Saving the World Starts in Africa
- The 2008 Brainsturbator Update: Back to School
- The Mind of Tony Smith: A Guided Tour
- Welcome to Brainsturbator 2.0
- 10 Ways YOU Can Fight Fascism Around the World
- Networks, Bacteria, and the Illusion of Control
- The Quest for the Elusive Chronon
- Brainsturbator 101: Who I Am, What I Do
Brainsturbator on Twitter
Thai Lemongrass Soup is The Clarifier. Any time I feel tired, I take a chug of the broth and I get lucid + focused very quick-like.
Wall Street wins another battle in the fight against information symmetry + data access: http://bit.ly/99vtuz
@mathpunk More. It's an existential issue for the human species. There will be a conservative environmental movement when it gets worse.
@mathpunk But actually having a partisan pro wrestler brand himself onto the whole debate is a whole order of magnitude worse, I think.
Gore 1) politicized a global issue, 2) focused on the least important problem, and 3) appointed himself the Poster Boy for the rest of us.
I think Al Gore is probably the single worst thing to happen to the environmental movement in the past 50. #DISCUSS
@NurtureGirl Personally, having a credible path to the change is the clincher. If your solution involves Washington DC, I'm not listening.
@NurtureGirl "Wedge Issues" are more than a technical term, it's a centuries-deep technique for social control in the West.
@klintron It's definitely worth interacting with, although I'm sure it'll bother you like it pissed off what I call Me.
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We Salute You
22 responses to "Brainsturbator Wants You….to drop outta school now"
Nov 06, 2006 at 7:27 PM
chaoflux23 says...
Dugg!
Nov 06, 2006 at 8:27 PM
Natalie says...
Nice in theory. Too bad most kids who drop out or are withdrawn from school are 1. likely to have much less opportunity (this is vague, I know) than those who complete the 12 year “sentence,” or 2. likely to be home-schooled and fostered by redneck, right-wind, religious nutjobs for parents. Ech.
Nov 06, 2006 at 9:54 PM
Kid Last says...
Yeah, I agree with Natalie. Only a few middleclass suburban kids could apply to this. I agree that there are different directions that can be tasken other than school, they are not nearly as easy and are not something that a person can be “covinced” into doing. It’s a situational circumstance that is rare to find.
As for Upskii, in order to “live in a different city every year” you need either an excess of resources, or the ability to locate and maintain a job and secured place of residence every year. This is unrealistic, and it completely ignores the reson for this learning. It’s just as self serving as a formal education. What about community building?
“Attend a different place of worship every week.”....wait, I thought we were escaping dogma. How about volunteering for the poor, old, or the very young. Living in the woods, while not a social experiment, prepares us for a world with less technology. This will be an essential gift to pass down to succeeding generations as we reach inevitable mass population levels and industrial collapse.
....or I guess we could just backpack in Europe.
Nov 07, 2006 at 3:09 AM
George says...
Hold on...the most important thing William said was this: “I’m doing this for five years as a freshman survey course. Then I’ll have a better idea of what to pursue as a sophomore.”
A 5-year freshman? Hmm…
He realizes, like a lot of us, knowledge, real knowledge, takes time, and he’s put himself on the road to...here it is...his own personal knowledge of the world, so that he may better interact with it, and I’m going to assume, himself.
Don’t criticise the poor guy for wanting something more from life. If anything, wish him well, and move on. For it is within our criticism of others, that we reveal our jealousy of them. You can’t give advice on something you, yourself are never going to try.
The system is broke, people. Hail William Upski, for displaying the testicular fortitude (The Balls) to dare attempt a change.
I drink to you, Upski! May you live long & prosper.
Nov 07, 2006 at 4:52 AM
Khanverse says...
FUCK!
I just wrote a witty response that got raped by your website’s insistence on a real EMAIL.
FUCK!
anyway,
While this was typed very well and I agree with the central tenets, this isn’t a practically applicable model for all of humanity despite your heroic ego.
I’m about to graduate in 6 months from DeVry inshallah.
I’m like 22, should be done before I’m 23.
Granted I did have the pressure of the folks, I also had their support while I “struggled” and “failed” by skippin school, smoking pot and reading up on things you mentioned on CC.
Still though, this school is literally selling diplomas and degrees. I think they’ve assumed that college is mostly useless and we only need to know the fundamentals so they let us finish superfast and ONLINE. We get good grades and get hired soon after.
What’s cool is because I’m learning marketing (on my own and fitting that info in with their nice words and phrases) and I’m gonna eventually use it to place myself in positions of power.
You are lucky enough to be surrounded by trees, acid, weed and....
By being the woodpecker petting huggable whisker-laden Jesus III that you are you’re marginalizing yourself, IMHO, being foreign to the stratified structure and unable to use the leverage that a two-faced fucker (Shaved version of 37 with a suit in board meetings) could.
This is also why our alliance is very important.
Disregard everything and FUCK YOU if you work for the CIA.
Nov 07, 2006 at 5:47 AM
Dick Hefacheese says...
Damn good post
Everytime I come on here I find at least 1 quote that I’d like to transmit into the thoughts of everybody who’d understand it.
Thanks for all the hardwork Wombat.
Nov 07, 2006 at 1:58 PM
Bacchus23 says...
I have a bunch of great pdf files that I think you could add to your library. How do I get them to ya?
Nov 07, 2006 at 2:57 PM
thirtyseven says...
At the risk of alienating people, here’s what an asshole I am:
All you pronouncement on what’s possible and impossible, what’s realistic and unrealistic, is a reflection of what you’re willing to do, not an assessment of external reality.
If you have the courage and drive to make it happen, it will happen. I know this is true because I’ve seen it my whole life. I say that as an observer, not as a superhuman furball of courage and drive, because I’m not. But I’ve learned enough from the people who inspired me to see that.
Also, Khan, you know exactly why I “marginalize” myself, you know that I view it as a supreme tactical advantage, and you know I have no intentions of either “working with the system” or being a martyr for the next generation’s T-shirts.
Thanks for reading, folks, especially if it bothers you.
Nov 07, 2006 at 3:26 PM
Khanverse says...
Instead of defending myself and saying, I’d love to do it, I’ll just wait until you practice what you advocate and provide a model of implementation of say, even half the things you mentioned in this article.
Dropping out isn’t an inherently “brave” or “positive” thing to do, that’s all about the impetus or motivation.
I didn’t think you were ready to die for what you believe, if you believe anything at all. I guess my point is once you remove the barriers, physical, financial, emotional, spiritual, familial, or whatever, that are preventing you from embodying the actions you preach, lots of your loyal henchmen will follow suit.
You know I love you regardless.
Nov 07, 2006 at 7:08 PM
Marumaru says...
There is a conflict between individualism and a kind of warped communitarianism. Personally find nothing wrong with providing some forms of “opportunity” for “disadvantaged” people - after all, how did anyone ever get their start if not circumstance and a certain amount of fortuity?
What I mean is the central conflict of organized behavior. The “individual” may be bolstered up in some ways, but inextricable from circumstance and surroundings, exists to interact… with anything.
That being said, agreed with much here at a surface level…
There is of course the matter of what circumstances and surroundings the individual interacts with ... including possible variations *unknown to the experience pattern*. Variation is often tuned out as it’s not “the focus”, or within the “acceptable” focii.
Fear makes a certain amount of sense, but wreaks havoc when allowed to consume the faculties of rational interpretation… which are somewhat limited anyway… ah, sigh.
CS Hyatt said something about anxiety I agree with… might not remember it exacty, but… “anxiety is a tool for learning about one’s weakness”
Awareness can only be controlled as aware of awareness… and I speculate that people can only ever be said to get what they “deserve” if they have the ability to conciously give it to their own selves.
Anyway, appreciate what you are up to.
I’m happy to have stimulating controversial topics to think about/discuss.
Nov 07, 2006 at 7:25 PM
MaruMaru says...
“Civilizing” children - and certain forms of strictness - have a point.
When someone “at the top” misuses an organization they don’t live the purported princicples of ... they generally aren’t aware of better alternatives, not in a visceral sense.
It’s too easy to simply condemn both ways.
Of course, thought is nothing without the action intertwined with it - whether someone may consider something idly, or live it, depends not merely on carrying out thoughts/feelings (which one is continually doing anyway), but what THE ACTUAL THOUGHTS ARE.
This has me thinking too many things at once, sorry if it’s too disjointed to interpret. Have to go do something else, so bye!!
Have fun!
Nov 08, 2006 at 3:50 AM
Kid Last says...
I’ve actually gone the “exploratory” route. I’ve hitch-hiked for a few years and lived in activist communities in the south-east fighting in solidarity with the appalachian community and I’ve seen how travel can broaden horizons. I also have a supportive family that could offer me financial assistance if I ever was in serious trouble at any time. This is not a universal plan, I have eventually learned. It’s important to take in life experiences and push personal levels of comfort. However, if you aree looking to transcend the career driven mentality of standardized education, it’s important to actualize what you learn from out-of-school life. After all of my personal quests, I’ve come to realize that everywhere I go, I’m just an outsider incapable of creating any solidarity as a “lifestyle tourist.” I’ve come to realize the most useful and satisfying education is going to come from making my community as strong as the others I have visited. I have no desire to go on speaking tours or write books, and personally I feel that that is will’s ambition. Sure I’m jealous, he’s financially successful and its able to fund his adventures. Right on. I just need something more.
Nov 08, 2006 at 3:54 AM
Kid Last says...
no...I need something different.
Nov 08, 2006 at 8:41 AM
thirtyseven says...
same here, man.
same here.
Nov 08, 2006 at 3:53 PM
Miqel says...
I had the weird circumstance of attending a Montessori school in Jackson Mississippi from 1st to 7th grade. Motessori schools treat each child as an individual, they don’t assume children have inherent limitations and teach them geometry, music, a foreign language and art starting in 1st grade. Kids are allowed to skip grades in subjects they are good at, for example I was taking 7th grade biology and literature in 5th grade.
And then I went to a public school from 8th to 11th. The shift was incredible ...
Public schools were like robot-farms for pavolvian conditioning. The bell rings and you all have to run to another room and study a random different subject for an hour.
It was a rigid, boring, static structure that is totally the opposite of what a young mind is wired for. Definitely engineered to supress individuality & cause neurosis and authority dependence.
- school-kids are similar to hostages or prisoners, because they have ZERO autonomy and even basic bodily functions like urination requre approval. This teaches a deeply ingrained submissiveness to arbitrary authority & prepares them to accept being controlled in varying degrees for the rest of their lives.
My reaction was to revolt in whatever way was possible - in my case by embracing the ‘punk’ subculture of the time, experimenting (successfully!) with drugs and reading the ‘Book of the Subgenius’ & ‘Illuminatus trilogy’ in class, which caused some hillarious reactions from my teachers. By the first semester of 11th grade i had switched to a cooler ‘alternative’ or ‘magnet’ school but was unable to play the game any longer and dropped out!
I was dong a lot of LSD at that time and somehow discovered how to be invisible to the school faculty, so i still got away with showing up at noon and eating lunch there with my friends and hung out in the drama teachers classroom in the afternoon, even used the school bus system for a year or two after i dropped out to get around town for free. I think they didn’t even know i had quit, lol.
Anyway, dropping out is not so bad, if you have some motivation to keep learning. I was still able to ace the ACT, take some college courses (which were useless) and taught myself graphic design - which has kept me just as employed as any of the college grads i know.
Nov 09, 2006 at 5:17 AM
Kid Last says...
many of my friends who are college grads, the largest proportion being art related majors, are not employed at a workplace that even remotely resembles what they went to school for. Some have taken this as a blow and sacrificed thier burning passion for the mere kindling of a paycheck that offers guranteed (granted, this is debatable) security. This is a true shamem however this is not a reflection of the school system, or even a true problem at all. The real mess lies in our capital driven culture that is fundamentally opposed to a life outside the profit margin. So opposed in fact that survival has become secondary to the accumulation of wealth.
My point is, if school aids the increase of knowledge that will excite and motivate towards socially rewarding goals, then by all means attend. However, if you think you’re only in school because you’re afraid that doing what you want will not be enough to keep you alive, you can always get a part time job. Pretty soon, you’ll meet others in your situation, as long as you work to find them. This is where I agree with the article. College is a good social network, but tradespeople in the real world are even better.
We need to pool resources and volunteer our support to those who are working to expand opportunities for everyone, not just stockholders and politicians.
Nov 25, 2006 at 10:35 PM
tablesturnD Uslavedriver says...
it’s funny that there is a section for comments anyway because it made a lot of people miss the part where Jim PloofBeam said that he doesnt take seriously what any one else thinks(scroll up) so wow that really is brainsturbation. icky stuff daddy! Do you think a jackal could turn himself into a lion in 1 lifetime?
Nov 26, 2006 at 5:45 AM
thirtyseven says...
Yep.
Jan 12, 2007 at 10:07 AM
Ikipr says...
You should advocate more Magick and LSD, shite, why not encourage the childrens to utilize the two @ the same time?
Jan 12, 2007 at 12:28 PM
Phyllis Masters says...
Public schools have moved beyond 8-3 M-F and into our homes. If your child misses “too much” school, you, the parent, can be jailed. My youngest child is ten. She became ill in the fall and missed 7 days of school, spread out over two weeks. I received a letter from the school district informing me that they were going to put her in “drop-out prevention” classes, and that I would be arrested by truancy officers if she was absent for more than ten days.
“Drop-out prevention classes”??? I shot them back a letter explaining that she had not been skipping school. What do they think? That she cut school to go smoke cigarettes and get drunk? She had a bad cold, with a fever just above 100 degrees, and according to their own policy, children can not come to school with a temperature of over 100 degrees. They shot back a letter asking for a doctor’s note. Our access to health care is virtually non-existent, so NO there is not a doctor’s note. They vaguely threatened to send Child Protective Services after me.
It isn’t bad enough that they are trying their best to kill all of her creativity and imagination? Isn’t it bad enough that she has to go to a place every day that creates a hostile environment by allowing the other kids to tell her she is weird and ugly? Apparently not. Threatening to take her from her mother and put her into state care--now THAT is a way to insure that everyone does exactly what the school district wants.
Jan 12, 2007 at 5:51 PM
thirtyseven says...
^^Wow, that really saddens me to hear it’s gotten that bad already. I have several friends who work in education who are getting very depressed and disillusioned by rapidly increasing restrictions on their curriculum and voices. No Child Left Behind was a very curious way to phrase it, and I didn’t want to believe my more cynical friends who insisted it was a direct reference to LaHaye’s series—that school was being turned into a patriotic/evangelical indoctrination camp.
But I can only deny the evidence for so long. Incidentally, I am working on a follow up piece on how to fight back and disrupt schools and wake up communities to what’s actually going on in them. Perhaps that will be the article that gets us shut down, but I got away with advocating personal nuclear weapons, so let’s hope not.
I very much appreciate that comment, Phyllis.
Jan 12, 2007 at 6:47 PM
Natalie says...
But what about the kids whose parents aren’t educated or concerned enough to foster their child’s own education and development? Most homes, rather than schools, are the birth of the atriotic/evangelical indoctrination camps, it seems.