Classism and education (nov 16)

Something that has been increasingly part of my daily life,

the baffling notion, that people who receive higher marks in academics,
are somehow more valuable, or predisposed to be important in later life.

Maybe there is truth to the statement that honors students are the future
members of the managerial class,
but where does the idea that this is how we should want to be come from?

I don't dream of power, I don't dream of money. I dream of equality, art and meaning.

I want to know why people with a higher GPA are warned not to engage in protest,
not to be careless and get into trouble, because if you do, you'll be grouped with Those people.

A lot of this is bullshit.
Just because you are effective in getting a high GPA doesn't mean you are more worthwhile than somebody who doesn't. Low grades don't mean you're useless, in fact a lot of kids just can't stand the arbitrary routines and violence that are part of school "life."

Among my peers I am not a poor academic performer. I go through the throws and play a "winning game" that is, I "earn" relatively high marks.
But where does winning come in? I am a slave, and a whore.
If you saw my school day you'd see I participate in disgusting violence on a regular basis.
In a large part of my day I compromise the art out of my lifestyle, I allow myself to be numbed into this coveted clarity. ars longa vita brevis
I don't need to be focused, because life is in many ways just a long and valuable tangent.
Get the fuck over education as a contest. Everybody learns as best they can, and nobody is special. The winners often win because the scales tip in their favor, because they like me are willing to conform to the mold, to be a product, judged by efficiency, applicability, output, cost, and nature of accommodation. A lot of the people who do poorly academically fail because of discrimination, or they are otherwise better to exploit in ways not needing a depth of material knowledge if you could call it that, I haven't figured out for sure where it starts, but so far as I can see, classism is something that hurts you before you're even born.
more on this later.

Considerations

About the U.S and pertaining to "actions to be taken against perceived threats be they realistic or not."

Chalmers Johnson in a review wrote:

Another subject about which Holmes is strikingly original is the subtle way in which the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the United States' self-promotion as the sole remaining superpower clouded our vision and virtually guaranteed the catastrophe that ensued in Iraq. "Because Americans…. have sunk so much of their national treasure into a military establishment fit to deter and perhaps fight an enemy that has now disappeared," he argues, "they have an almost irresistible inclination to exaggerate the centrality of rogue states, excellent targets for military destruction, [above] the overall terrorist threat. They overestimate war (which never unfolds as expected) and underestimate diplomacy and persuasion as instruments of American power" (pp. 71-72).


http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/44019.html

Because Americans…. have sunk so much of their national treasure into a military establishment...

This also involves the same ideas I liked from Martin Luther King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" which I first read here http://demosuniverse.blogspot.com/2007/09/beyond-vietnam-martin-luther-kingbeyond.html%20
among many very useful remarks, he said,

"So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. "



I'm looking into more historical commentary on our governments policies... how they may or may not relate to some interesting trends of other nations..

the idea of bringing democracy
rogue states
persuasion and communication
are going to be built on briefly, but there is much more.