Talk about a Slippery Slope - Concentration Camps!

[Brant Gaede]

I wasn't a very good student--"shitty" may be too strong a word--and there were several reasons. In a way I dropped out of college for the same reason I dropped out of Vietnam: not a good place to be in the first case and not good enough in the second. "Not good enough" describes all my school experiences, from the "progressive" (current usage) pre-school my mother started for me (still going strong) to the last day. Even my Special Forces medical training needed more hands on integration with the classroom material. In this last case I'm talking about technique more than distorting content. I admit I could have made more lemonade out of all those lemons, but there wasn't enough sugar. In the case of the pre-school I wanted to study and learn but the school wanted to "socialize." The socialization, unbeknownst to the teachers, consisted of a bunch of boys--I didn't know what the girls were doing this way if anything--forming an exclusionary clique leaving me and others out. I understood it was the work of one boy. I did understand that the other boys in it were sucking up to him. I wasn't that kind of suck up. My sucking up was always one on one, not one on a clique. (My personal sucking up story is another kind of story than the one I'm telling here and one I have yet to think through so it's too soon for now. It's not all bad so "sucking up" may be the wrong term except for starters. For instance, I suck up to competence.)

Anyway my natural bent and strong point has always been liberal arts. I wanted to understand people and the world deferring to reality. For me understanding led to the creativity of making more truth out of that underlying truth so I'm always about truth especially the basic stuff. The drawback is constantly learning the need to unlearn the wrong stuff I had put into my brain or had had put into my brain osmotically during my years in class. Nobody even pretended to teach critical thinking and how to strongly apply the results and the necessity of these two steps. My pre-school took me through the first grade and I was so up on getting out for I was all about thinking--but not critical thinking--and my pre-school classmates weren't nor my school--I was sure I was going to hit the ground running in second grade as I was so far ahead of everyone else already. Boy! Talk about ignorance! My pre-school was better than the public school years.

Jumping years ahead to the end of this journey, after two years of college I dropped out because I was too lazy to apply myself. I didn't blame the school, however, just myself. Army, jump out of perfectly good airplanes, learn how to kill people and save lives, Vietnam. Back to school, a better one in fact but not all that great--it was the University of Arizona--the campus of which I had hung out on as a boy--and after a semester and a half I dropped out for I wasn't working hard enough and took off for New York City metro area where my father and step-mother lived. NBI. 1968. That's the end of the story except for the big flesh-out which is the point of writing all these words. Take, for instance, two classes at the U: one in American social history and the other intellectual history. (I had earlier dropped out of my philosophy101 class simply because it was crap.) I knew most of what the intelligent prof. was teaching was wrong and/or uninteresting. I was supposed to stuff it all into my head then regurgitate it in the tests in a form that pleased the prof. All I was interested in was the truth of the matters not putting crap into my brain and that was that. It's hard enough getting rid of my own crap and I'm sure there's crap in my head to this day to be gotten rid of. I didn't need or want someone else's crap forced into my head to pass a test.

So ended my formal education.

--Brant