Went to college, got the T-shirt and $150,000 debt
by Jon Rappoport
September 26, 2013
Yes, a whole lot of boys and girls are paying $150,000 for a T-shirt. Now that’s a sales job. We’re not talking about about a purse that costs three grand or a $500 bottle of bitter champagne or 10 grand for a vacation cruise that gives you a solid case of dysentery.
This is a really sublime con. And I have a solution for it.
The student enrolls in what I simply call The Course.
He goes to the library once a week and checks out a stack of books. Any books. For four hours a day, five days a week, for six years, you chain him to a table in a quiet room at home.
There’s a thick notebook on the table and pencils. And the books. No computer. No phone. No videos. No music. No nothing. You walk out and close the door.
That’s it.
The rest is up to him.
During his six years, the student might read and/or write about television, space travel, the process of elephants giving birth, soldier ants, the CIA, God, the suppression of bubblegum sales during World War 2, an analysis of photographs of desert mirages, Jesus, the Rockefellers, malaria, ghosts, football, worship of idols in ancient Polynesia, the evolution of the hot dog, syphilis, leprosy, plutonium, Plato, gastric ulcers, Middle East wars, building houses out of rubber tires, the Federal Reserve, cell phone radiation…
Or he might do nothing.
It’s his choice.
Nobody teaches him anything. Nobody checks up on him. Nobody encourages him. Nobody guides him. Nobody tests him or grades him or graduates him.
“This is the first and last time I’ll be speaking to you about The Course. You’re going to start today. Good luck.”
I’ll put that up against any liberal arts curriculum in America.
And of course, it has a Zen component. Silence. Inevitable confusion. Resentment. The need for answers which never come. Frustration. Choice.
And it’s free. No T-shirt, no student loans, no government interference, no administration, no brainwashing, no social agenda, no sense of entitlement, no hype.
There’s a chance the student may actually become interested in something ON HIS OWN.
If not, so be it. He has no one to blame.
“I guess I’m not curious about what I don’t know. I’m a robot. So I’ll just go to the nearest programming center and sign up. They can make me over into whatever they need. No problem.”
In case you haven’t noticed, our society has become obsessed, at every possible level, with meddling in other people business. I’m not talking about honest prosecution of crimes. I’m talking about downright interference.
“Don’t you think you should be doing THIS?” Shouldn’t you stop doing THAT?” “Don’t you care about what your grandmother THINKS?”
The Course is meddle-free. So even if a student comes out of his six years with nothing, at least he know what’s it’s like to exist, for four hours a day, in a non-meddling space.
And his parents get the message as well.
“I just want to take Jimmy some tea and cookies while he’s studying.”
“Hold on, Martha, don’t you remember when we signed the contract, it said no interruptions? If you walk in there, they can come and shoot you. And I believe they will. They were very emphatic on that point.”
“I want to make sure he’s all right.”
“Here…let me read from their leaflet: ‘You as the parent may experience a grinding need to walk in on your precious little doofus while he’s doing The Course. Recognize this comes from your craven fear of being alone with nothing but your own thoughts. You’re assuredly deranged. Should you ignore this warning, your child will be only too happy to report you, we will take you out, and it won’t be pretty…’”
I believe The Course is an idea whose time has come.
Bonus: you can ignore the towers of absolute crap the government shovels about education.
The Course is stark and uncompromising. Beauty comes in many forms.
Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com
All great scholars read extensively outside of the classroom environment, and independently of others. Here is revolutionary Physics, that is taught in no classrooms.
http://www.commonsensescience.org
My entire adult life has mostly been immersed in science and mathematics, including quantum field theory, so this is not BS.
I agree that clearly universities are a scam.
But I disagree about listening to music while studying. Music is not incompatible with studying. I study with music.
Home school for higher education. Why the f*** not ?
There is a great TED talk about introverts… about how our culture values the extrovert. ( I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but if you google Ted talk- introverts, she will pop up) She talks about the fact that the educational system is often putting students in collaborative groups without allowing the quiet, alone time needed for “deep thought”. She makes the point that collaboration is productive, only when individual thought has been developed.
Your “Course” allows for 2 things which I believe are really important. – quiet undisturbed, focused time and immersion. In most endeavors, something happens when we really push ourselves, some space or inner faculty magically opens and expands. When we stay within comfort zones – that “something” never gets tapped into. So we don’t even know it’s there. I’m speaking from my own experience, but I’m sure it is a universal opportunity, just waiting….
Thought provoking, as always. 🙂
If around a 1/3 of 2014’s potential college freshmen cancelled their plans to attend in whatever exorbitantly priced, debt based fuzzy studies PROGRAM, at whatever reDOUBTABLE INSTITUTION they plan on attending and enrolled in your course, 2020 may be the start of a real renaissance. Not only would all those students be liberated from a life of debt slavery ($150,000 plus the vig..sorry I mean interest), these INDIVIDUALS would be shaping their own unique selves, rather than BEING shaped into manufactured ‘cogs in the wheel of the system’. (a System of A Down). Pity they won’t get to put that tassled mortar-board on top of their heads an accessory to their flowing gown, and SHEEP skin B.S.B.A’s in hand . Nope they’ll be missing out on all that tradition, instead they’ll get to own/wear /display a rare expression on their face, an expression rarely seen these days, it’s the expression that comes to ones face when an original thought is formed. Any well stocked library would be good enough. Wouldn’t want it to be The Library of Babel although hopefully Borges book would be in circulation IF a course participant CHOSE to check it out. The ‘thick notebook on the table and pencils. And the books. No computer. No phone. No videos. No music. No NOTHING, part of the course description is what makes this course so promising. In the beginning he or she may have to be chained, but after about a week of detox from all their ‘digital toys’, they’d be free of their chains. It’d be like the scene in Cable Guy when Jim Carey falls on the giant satellite and puts everyone’s T.V. out. Next one guy sitting in front of his T.V. with remote in hand snaps out of his trance walks over to his book shelf, blows the dust of a book opens it up, angelic music plays as light shines from the book,. Then…that look comes over the guys face. In the room there would be “nothing” (no 21st Century Digital Toys), however “nature abhors a vacuum”, and what might initially seem like a stark vacuum of nothingness, will be filled with creation. A brave parent may have to run the risk of being shot for smuggling in multiple thick note books as the “little doofus” is done reading and is furiously blazing through one thick notebook after the next , with his own thoughts, opinions, ideas, drawings, inventions …FREE FROM THE POWER OF SUGGESTION! ON THEIR OWN! EXITED FROM THE MATRIX…erGO CREATION!
“where there is nonthing, where there is nothing, there is God” (Creation).
-W.B. Yeats-
Where There is Nothing
I was forgetting, we cannot destroy the world (that is, our commitment to the material) with armies, it is inside our minds/(consciousness) that it must be destroyed, it must be consumed in a moment inside our minds. God will accomplish his last judgement, first in one man’s mind and then in another. He is always planning last judgements. And yet it takes a long time.
I was mistaken when I set out to destroy Church and Law. The battle we have to fight is fought out in our own mind. There is a fiery moment, perhaps once in a lifetime, and in that moment we see the only thing that matters. It is in that moment the great battles are lost and won, for in that moment we are a part of the host of Heaven…We shall not come to that joy, that battle, till we put out the senses, everything that can be seen and handled, as I put out this candle…We must put out the light of the stars and the light of the sun and the moon (and the light of the laptop:) Til we brought everything to nothing once again. I saw a broken vision but now it is all clear to me. Where there is nothing, where there is nothing the is God (creation,art, poetry).
-W.B. Yeats
The problem is that humans are so enamored with a degree, diploma, certification, etc..
Education, or knowledge in and of itself, is actually ridiculed by most right thinking people. Everyone’s first question regarding an area of study is invariably, “What are you going to do with that?”
Doctors know medicine, lawyers know the law, exterminators know bugs, etc…
We are all just specialized ants in a colony. Go to college, get your specialization, and be another dependent insect.
You’ve nailed it- “Our society has become obsessed, at every possible level, with meddling in other people business.”
Who would have thought anyone would try to pass laws about what size soda you can drink? The fact that anyone would even think it’s their business or need to meddle in something like that (let alone pass laws about it!) should tell you volumes about where we’re at and where we’re heading.
If I may add one thing: Remember the Wizard of Oz? What did the Scarecrow get? He wanted a brain, and he got a diploma!
I love the theme this week Jon….it special. Excuse my sarcasm.
I awoke this morning to the thought “Mine parasites”. My whole dreamscape last night was about someone, something, fucking with my mind. Reality is crossing over into unreality….and not sure which one is the real.
I thinking I am possibly going insane….maybe that’s a good thing, in this particular Bardo anyway. I not really a Buddhist, I just like the word….Bardo!
Anyway I’m babbling, it too early…. Takes a while before the thoughts settle to bottom, and I can find out what kind of day it’s going to be, and I can pull some coherence to the cognitive front… If there is such a thing.
I had this conversation….the ‘school conversation’ with my youngest last night. He is twenty-three and knows quite well he is on that slippery slope we call wage slavery…sorry a dead end job..Sorry stepping stone to success. He wants to go to school, but the expenditure, he is already worrying about the debt, the money, the time and life involved, in listening to a bunch of intellectual narcists fuck with your head until you say yes. Then they present you with a piece of paper, with a gilded calligraphic first letter and at the same time ask you to wear a really funny hat. Absolutely unbelievable how much that will really cost him in the end…. And I don’t just mean in dollars. Your creativity, your imagination, unzipping your mind in front of this….brain butchery, these thought thieves. “Please, please make something with a title and a portion of false merit with a cherry on top….honest”.
Really I was lost to say something of truth to him, I was completely lost. What am I going to say to this life dilemma he is caught in?
Whither it is truth I speak, or some righteous indignation, after being snipped from the tree of intelligentsia at an early age. I couldn’t stand the idea of being buggered by that many priests of high knowledge. I mean its pornographic what they will put you through.
Are we really gaining in intelligence, adding to society, are we actually solving something, making it better, expanding consciousness, by jamming more of these trivial lies they speak into an already traumatized psyche. Let’s be honest with ourselves these schools crank out more of the same, blank eyed digits, with a gold star slapped on the forehead…deadheads…I mean half of them have learned to go online and pay a thesis writer. Mom and Dad taught them that one, while handing over the emerald American Express card. The ways to cheating yourself into a PhD are colorful to say the least. Let’s face it most of them are ‘Rocking Horse Winners’.
But still my dilemma….what do I tell my son.
And thusly I appeal to the spirit of my young son, be prepared to have your heart broke.
Michael Burns
Like most everything else today, our pied piper society is just following the rest of society. Even the people that are completely aware of the (purposely) dire state of formal education today, and the absolute sham that it is still send their kids off to school. I can understand – the pressure to comply and conform is enormous. But think of the life-long consequences……..
It’s so clear, so obvious. Ever wonder why centuries ago people were so “brilliant” (sans the computer by the way!)? Independence from the system. They researched independently. Thought independently. They had more knowledge than most can even comprehend these days, and often could dictate this same massive body of knowledge in six, seven or more languages! Who do you know today that can do that? Who do you know that can even comprehend what I just said, what these 17th, 18th, & 19th century demi-gods actually accomplished?
Why and how could they accomplish this? Again, the answer is so obvious, but most simply refuse to acknowledge. It’s just to painful, to realize that, among other things, your entire education, from grade school to university, has been a lie. And not just a lie, but a purposeful dumbing-down of everything you could have been.
Today’s formal education serves one purpose only: to ready you to become a productive worker slave in the matrix. I say, buck the system, become the next Beethoven, Bach, DaVinci, Rembrandt. It’s never too late, imagine that. . .
I love you all.