Depending on who you ask, the United States public school system is a huge waste of time, a factory to teach kids how to live life as factory workers, free daycare, a temple to learning, or a place to socialize future citizens. But I know what it really is and it's less cynical than you might expect from me. Sure, I could have been super jaded about the public school system but I was lucky and went to a Satanic elementary school (if you're curious, just search the blog for "Haman" or "Satanic elementary school" or "AC/DC"), so I had a love of learning about the Devil from an early age. Anyway, I believe the public school system (and while I can only truly speak to the United States' version, I'm going to assume it's very much the same concept across other nations and cultures) was the easiest solution to keeping civilization advancing. That probably sounds obvious and you're already in the comment section typing up responses such as "Like, DOI!" and "What a stunning reveleation /sarcasm" and "ur trash 1v1 me". (Believe me, the only correct way to end that sentence was with the punctuation outside of the quotes.)
Listen, I get it! It's a simple concept! But in our modern times when it seems like half of the country thinks education corrupts the youth (which, if you went to Haman Elementary in Santa Clara, California, it certainly fucking did. Long live my Lord and Master!), sometimes simple truths need to be beat like a living horse (that's what the phrase "No use in beating a dead horse" means, right? It means there is use in beating a living horse and we should beat them more. Right?). Or did I mean beat like a drum? You know what? Sometimes I wish I learned more than ritual summonings and secret hand gestures.
What I'm trying to say and which I won't make any clearer with this next statement is that the public school system was the best version of throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. In this analogy, "shit" is "knowledge" and "wall" is "children." Because the only way to advance civilization and continue to make things better for everybody is to make sure young people are caught up on the story. Sure, a lot of them (and I should probably say "a lot of us" because look at me as an adult: writing a blog about comic books and Star Trek) won't take up the torch to help advance civilization. But that's the thing. You don't know which kid is going to make the connections to establish the next thing that helps civilization mature. At the very least, you know that if you don't throw shit at children, they're never going to have the opportunity to understand exactly where they are in civilization's timeline and how they can make it better going forward. Also, can we sometimes just throw real shit at children because now that idea is in my head and it's not going anywhere?
If we break this system, we are accepting eventual stagnation and a probable decline in the overall levels of satisfaction with life. And as we can see in our modern times, a growing percentage of unimaginative dullards don't fucking care about progress. Education teaches their kids that their parents were unimaginative dullards and so those unimaginative dullards would rather destroy the educational system than maybe look inward and try not to be an unimaginative dullard. And let's not forget about the people who want to destroy the system simply because it uplifts everybody and not just the people who look like they do.
Obviously the public school system doesn't present enough material to create an adult that will truly help drive humanity's balls through civilization's goalposts (help me. I think I have some kind of sickness that makes me speak in analogies, sort of like Lyme Disease but if I were bitten by a conservative talking head). The public school system is just to fire the curiosity of the children so they'll strive to become more educated on their own. And at one time, college was the perfect way to specialize and really get in-depth on the things which really held the child's interest. But, once again, a certain section of the population viewed higher education as a slippery slope to being a decent person and so they've demonized it. One way to make a higher education less possible was to make it less affordable. Although making college less accessible was probably a backlash to college students protesting the government's participation in certain wars which made the government say, "Where are we going to get all the young dead people we'll need for future wars? I mean, they'll only be dead after! We're not into necromancy. Not everybody went to Haman Elementary." Free or affordable college just gives less privileged young people more options than the ones people who don't want things to change want them to have. After all, job providers aren't really as good at providing jobs as they seem to want everybody to think they are. So they need a system which forces people into debt, or convinces them to saddle themselves with a huge mortgage, or hypnotizes them into thinking children are great things to have in their lives so that they'll always need the shitty job they have to pay for their tiny sentient wells where money is thrown.
I wish I was more coherent and less digressive than I am so I could get my point across. But this sometimes happens after I've read two or three comic books by Ann Nocenti. Let me just take a moment to cleanse my aura and I'll try to be more succinct. "Master Satan, please direct my aggression and blood lust into a fine focal point as sharp as the tip of the Lance of Longinus so that I may do your bidding to corrupt His lost lambs and bring them to the beastly reality of this cum-stained world. Thank you my Father. I count the days until I will be welcomed into your embrace of unholy fornication."
In summation, education can only be attained by stacking one block upon the other. You need a system which both teaches the basics of how we got to where we are and also weeds out those that don't fucking give a shit about climbing the pyramid of blocks that's already there to add more to the top. Some people are meant to simply take care of the foundational blocks. Some people will climb partway up and improve the blocks in the middle. But you need a system to find the people who will craft the blocks for the future top of the pyramid. And as an added benefit, the higher one climbs, the better a person they generally become. Sure, you still have many climbers who only see profit in the journey. But some of them do their part as well (granted, not a lot of them. Most of them just want to find a way to keep all the blocks for themselves and establish a toll gate halfway up the pyramid and then convince everybody that the toll gate has always been there and it was never a free climb at all). And you also have people who consider the education gained as a simple corruption of the soul. But fuck those people. They pretend the pyramid doesn't even exist and only want to tear it down anyway.
Now imagine how big this pyramid must be in the 24th Century! It's so big that it allows people to pursue whatever they want to pursue without being shackled to a daily grind just to pay bills. Fucking imagine that, right?! A civilization so prosperous and educated about the nature of reality that nobody in the system feels compelled to force other people to throw their lives away so those people can earn somebody else another buck. What a healthy civilization! Now imagine that civilization butting heads with our 21st Century reality. Imagine how much we'd despise those 24th Century bastards! Don't they care about making another buck?! What are they thinking?! I bet it would end up in a battle just like "The Battle" in this episode!
Yes, we are the Ferengi. And, yes, I'm probably not going to say much about this episode. Picard gets mind-controlled by capitalism and almost destroys socialism. But he doesn't and the Ferengi learn a lesson about greed sometimes being bad which is a really hard lesson for them to swallow due to their big ears (because when they swallow I imagine their ears pop a lot?).
The main thing I learned from this episode is that every great starship captain in the Federation has a tactical maneuver named after them. If you haven't come up with a new innovation for space battles, you're a piece of shit not worthy to captain a Starfleet vessel. And that's all I have to say about that.
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