Why The ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act Can Suck My Balls

I’m done pretending to be an all-wise spiritual teacher. I’m more of a student than anything, and some things still piss me off. American Education is one of them.

I saw Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education, on The Colbert Report last night and she talked about how great this Act is, talking about how schools must meet certain standards in order to receive funding, etc. Wikipedia says the purpose of the Act is “to improve the performance of U.S. primary and secondary schools by increasing the standards of accountability for states, school districts, and schools.”

America says, “My children aren’t getting educated enough. What should I do?”
Dumbass American Logic says, “Hold schools more accountable so that they will educate our children more.”

This would be perfect, if kids didn’t have FREE WILL. Ms. Spellings said last night something about “making sure the kids are at their grade level,” as if it’s someone’s choice other than the kids. She’s not even denying the fact that the education system has no respect for free will.

Children aren’t empty boxes that get filled in proportion to how many books the grown ups place inside them. Education is not a mechanical process. You can’t put a child on a conveyor belt and expect him to come out the other end with an ‘education’ AND a soul. If you treat a kid like he’s a machine from age three to twenty-five, he’s gonna treat the WORLD like a machine, ‘functioning’ for 60 years and dying before his heart opens. He isn’t gonna know he has the potential for anything beyond his mechanically-educated, loveless, soulless ass.

American Education is a slaughterhouse.

Walk in the door and the education machine immediately chops off your will to live, one day at a time, starting when you’re a little kid so you never even notice. Then they hang you on a meat hook, upside down by your obedient carcass, slice you open with a piece of chalk, rip out your heart and replace it with books and papers and information. They tell you this is GOOD. You weren’t born perfect, you need to be EDUCATED. You weren’t born with infinite love and a unique gift for the whole world, you have to fill the mind with tripe so that you can calculate your gift to the world by using the kind of logic that brought about the hopelessly inane No Child Left Behind Act.

If we keep educating children the way we have been, we’ll keep getting grown ups like the ones who are making and voting for these stupid fuckin’ laws.

Here’s a sad story:

My friend is at her University orientation right now, meeting her schoolmates for the first time and signing up for classes. This is a girl who’s pretty awake. She’s at a very well-respected university, and the fruits of the education system came as a shock. She sent me a text message:

“Seems like a lot of people are going to college just to go…”

Yes, she even added that ellipsis (the three dots at the end) to emphasize the sadness.

I realized it too, back in the day. That’s why I dropped out. Someone asked me “What are you going to college for?” one too many times, prompting the answer “Because I was born and raised to like a sheep and didn’t realize it until now.”

Here’s how it works:

1) Place kid in mechanical education system young, so he has no idea what hit him
2) From the age of three to adulthood, create a system that makes all his decisions for him. What he’s gonna study, how he’s gonna study it, what building he’ll be returning to hundreds of times a year, what classroom he’ll be sitting in hundreds of times a year, what he does with his spare time every night, etc.
3) Keep him in this machine until he’s demonstrated enough obedience that you can reward him with a diploma
4) Congratulations, you now have an obedient, ‘educated’ young adult who has no idea what it’s like to run his own life. Perfect for all sorts of slave institutions, like society.

Ooh, I done called society a slave institution! Why?

Ever seen a homeless person? What sets him apart from all the other people?

He doesn’t have a job.

If you don’t WORK, you don’t LIVE.

If you don’t function in this country exactly the way it wants you to, you don’t have the right to live. You can choose to work a job, or you can sit your ass down on 3rd and Broadway and wait for death.

Soulless.

Are humans machines, who are to be thrown away as soon as they stop ‘functioning’?

Is there nothing more to life than ‘functioning’?

The more people are treated like machines, the more they’ll believe they are machines. We will forget that we are beings of love even more than we already have, and we’ll spiral down into an epidemic of apathy. Men whose facial expressions never change, functioning all day, then going home and sedating themselves with shitty movies and shitty beer. You like that picture?

I say, let beauty be a profession. Not cosmetics, not modeling. Let acknowledging and nourishing your own inner radiance and perfection be a profession. Let us transcend functioning, and acknowledge the value of life itself. Let’s recognize people for the unique works of art that they are. You can’t put the Mona Lisa and Doryphoros through a machine and have them come out the way you want them. Let us treat living beings as living beings, let’s remember that we are ALIVE.

FUCK functioning.

I’ve got an idea for a new act. It’s called the “Bring Children Back to Life” Act. Sign it, bitch!