We are in school, and (it’s) forever

You and I, good friend – are institutionalized for good.

Society, as we know her today, is nothing less than one worldwide school, and our student ID cards are irredeemably non-expiring.

Granted, let me perhaps be fairer – human society is a series, or worse still, a hierarchy of schools – the bounds of which may be family-wide, nationwide, continent-wide or outright global.

But still, they remain bounds, and of a school.

And like any functional school, society comes complete with headmasters and teachers and prefects – institutions and individuals fashioned to keep the mechanism well-oiled and sufficiently operable.

But most important, what every school comes with, and boasts of, is an exam system– a sieve with which to filter us, its pupils, along a continuum of established gradations and predetermined rankings.

Those considered fine enough to pass the sieve get promoted to the next grade or class – and naturally, those who remain suspended in the netting are either required to stay put, or suddenly find themselves rusticated – asked to try their talents elsewhere.

And herein lies the grave tragedy.

See, for an individual school, the idea of asking an inadequate pupil to try their talents elsewhere makes some sense perhaps, there being other schools to try – and in the event that all schools fail, the armed forces or religious ministry (at least in our part of the world) are usually an option.

But then – what happens to men and women who fail society’s exam?

Where else may they ‘try their talents’?

And yet as things stand – the modern (concept) of societal and individual success, the idea around which we determine whether people have made it in life (or more often not) – is almost perfectly calibrated along the scale of a school exam system.

The pedagogical attempts to standardize learning curricula and appraise (actual) pupils on the basis of a uniform benchmark in school exams are so noticeably reenacted in our adult struggles in the wider society that the parallels are embarrassingly remarkable – if not uninterestingly obvious.

And while it is increasingly conceded that uniformized school exams do students a dismal injustice in ascertaining the latter’s cerebral indices – a comparable consensus seems unforthcoming concerning our own adult or post-school society.

The popular phrasing for this, often attributed to that brilliant German-Jew, Einstein, holds – if the only measure of intelligence in the animal kingdom were one’s ability to climb a tree, monkeys would excel disproportionately, and fish would spend their entire lives convinced of their inanity.

Alas – it has even been argued, and not by voices too few or too unimportant – that modern schooling in and of itself, over and beyond exams, is a demonstrably ineffective if not harmful way of preparing future generations for the depth or breadth required of them to be holistic citizens of a decaying and self-destructive human nation.

According to these voices, the principle constituency served by the modern school system seems to be the capital-owning class – and not merely because the proprietors of costly, private prep-schools mint inordinate profits from the business.

Shorn of all pretensions toward imparting knowledge, schools today primarily (solely?) excel at chiseling units of labor out of the young rocks of human potential with which they are availed at the freshman intakes.

In short, the entire modern school system has been rightly excoriated as an incorrigible warehousing failure – the reason for which many enlightened people are increasingly opting to home-school and self-instruct their youngsters.

It must be admitted, though – that our world’s state-of-affairs today is so warped that even such enlightenment, let alone the inertia (financial and otherwise) to act on it, are forms of privilege denied many.

We thus have generations of victimized (abused) adults, who in turn metamorphose into legions of victimizing (abusive) parents.

Agreeing that the school system is desperately flawed – why then are we less inclined to questioning, leave alone jettisoning the school-like rubric of success we’ve imposed on ourselves over the handful of years of the species’ emergence?

As it is, there is essentially no difference between a fifteen-year-old’s report card – decorated severally with A, B and C grades – and the list of objects adults are unarguably mandated to cram into their lives in indication of (material) accomplishment – cars, clothes, degrees, house (s), spouse (s), et-cetera.

The common phrase for this absurd phenomenon is quite telling – the only distinction between parents and their children today, is in how the former own more expensive toys.

And as we are hurled headlong toward our certain funerals, the ultimate goal we all seem to have set ourselves is the honor of possessing a long (er) diploma or transcript of A, B and C grades.

Is it not our unspoken hope that these will serve as the incandescent subtext of our eulogies?

At worst, we must pity ourselves.

28^th/April/2017