In my world, and through its eternal glass-half-full lens, I see that this is all just means to an uneventful end, in which I teach Secondary English for a few years, pay off some student loans, get my masters and Ph.D in something more meaningful, and move on.
My professor is an interesting guy, though. He's got some fun interpretations of the world. One of these is this: That human nature hasn't changed. Everybody always talks about how children are different "these days" and how "in [their] day, school was like" this or that. The thing that people are missing is that the slate, the chalkboard, the stack of paper, the composition book, the Five Star Notebook, and the word processor are one in the same. The students have not changed any. The way in which they see the world - in which we see the world - is what's different. People pick on the methods of moving the knowledge from one person to the next - they don't see what's important - that the knowledge keeps moving. Trying to force old ways on new dogs doesn't work.
So my professor said, "People always speculate why people are the way they are. But it's been that way since humanity's beginning. You had Trog running around saying, "Why is Ugg such a jackass?"
And I'm sitting here right now wondering the same thing. Why are all these people with whom I go to class such class-A Idiots? Why do people think I'm such a weird bitch?
The other day, one of my classmates said that she has a "class full of morons." I don't think women like that need to be educating anyone, or passing those kinds of opinions on to students. Kids pick up on that stuff. When they think that adults around them think little of them, they in turn think little of themselves.
And these adults are the same people who think that machines make everything. They think human hands don't make the blue jeans they are wearing, that somewhere, some Chinese man throws a bolt of fabric, a spool of thread, a pair of scissors, a zipper, and a bag of buttons into a big black hole, and somewhere, in another part of the factory, a Pakistani woman drives by on the Wonkatania and blue jeans magically fall out of a chute into the truckbed behind her. As if by Magic.
That is not real.
That is the Easy Bake Oven version of the world.
What's even more horribly offensive is that the people who manage the places in which things are actually made don't do anything about this modern misconception. They let people think these things. The public's ignorance is their bliss. Why? It allows people to allow other people to suffer all sorts of bad working conditions so that they can buy their pants for $20 and throw them away not when they wear out, but when they grow tired of them. They don't feel bad about using resources because they think that everything is produced by magic machines.
When I look at photographs of people from long ago, there is something endearing about a coat that's been patched where it's worn. It reminds me of my grandfather. He had this blue quilted winter jacket that he wore out in the wood shop, and it had been mended in a bunch of places. Some of these stitches were done with white thread, and some had been done to match. But they were there. My grandmother fixed it. When a pocket got a hole in it, she sewed it back shut.
People don't do that anymore. They think the machines will make more. Why not just throw it away. The machines spit new ones out all the time. The machines will take care of us.
I was at an open house at Christmas time. There was a girl selling one of those home party plans like Home Interior, but with a more country bumpkin slant to it. She had these embroidered pictures inside a cheap frame that cost $40. I was trying to sell paintings and artwork, and this girl had these dumb pictures, and I was kind of offended because A) they were so expensive, and so carelessly put together; and B) the person who embroidered it probably didn't get a dollar for doing it. She's probably living in Taiwan somewhere, doing piecework. I said something about it, and this girl said, "That's made by a machine."
When I tried to explain to her that machines can't tie knots like what were on this piece of fabric, that machines can't hand-emboider, she said, "Yes they can - they sell embroidery machines at Jo-Anne's." She thought I was stupid. She thought I was a moron because I didn't know that machines make everything. This girl couldn't tell the difference between something machine-done and something hand-done. Not that it's important. They think that handmade things aren't as good as machine-made ones. They would rather buy something screen printed than something handpainted. Is that why real art is such an elitist thing?
That the majority of people would rather just sit around and think that machines do everything, that we should be thankful to them for what they do, and stop trying to make good things with our hands, stop trying to learn, stop trying to find the truth, stop trying to find new truths, make new discoveries?
It makes me feel incredibly helpless to think that people don't care that we're proving Plato right. He said that Gold is precious, so you make jewelry, not swords. You don't make crowns out of steel, either. And in this steel belt, where the collars are blue, education is much like gold. Plato thought that people were in society, in the places where they should be, and that you might as well not waste education on people who aren't going to amount to much of anything, anyway.
I think back now, on that open house, where all these people were wearing the jewelry that they'd bought from the jewelry party plan girl, and it seems so surreal:
The girl in the blue Lane Bryant sweat suit wearing the $50 Coral elasticized bracelet.
Made by machines.
Her matching $70 Coral necklace.
Made by machines.
The old lady with the sparkly rhinestone earrings/bracelet/necklace set.
Made by machines.
All these women, in their down-homey clothing, wearing overpriced costume jewelry, fauning around over home party plan decor.
Made by machines.
Demanding not that the quality of the things they buy be anything other than exactly the same as the other people around them, gobbling up the plastic Christmas clock, the screen-printed tin sign that says "Friends Welcome / Relatives by Appointment" (and in Comic Sans, of all fonts!), the hand-embroidered muslin square in the cheap, glued-together frame.
Made by machines.
Demanding not that their children receive a good public education, but that their kids "get good grades," as if one was any indication of another. I heard a woman say recently, upon moving her two children from one school to another, that the new school was a better school because her daughter, who had previously been "a C student" was now "an A student" - never thinking that the quality of the teacher may have gone down, that the standards were lower. No. Obviously, what's happened is that her daughter magically became more intelligent because of her mother's wise decision to enroll her in a different school. Yes, that must be it. As if by Magic.
Demanding that their jewelry, their lives, and their children's educations be made entirely of fool's gold - and wallowing in that paradise.
