THE RECITORIAL SOCIETY
Education
The last two essays indirectly referred to the educational system; I will now go into greater detail in addressing the efficacy of a college education.
The goal of basic education is to enable people to read, write, count, think, and express themselves properly, and should be accomplished by high school graduation at the latest. Unfortunately this goal is rarely attained in most communities, forcing colleges to increasingly function as remedial facilities, while bestowing upon its graduates degrees implying proficiency in a given field.
Upon meeting a young woman on a New York City subway she indicated that she graduated from a New York college with a Bachelor’s degree in English. When I asked her if she had read Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, and Zola, her response was “Who are they?” I explained that they were some of the greatest writers in the Western world. I asked if she had read Walt Whitman and her response was “Who’s he?” I explained that he is considered to be one of the greatest American poets. She asked me what he wrote and I informed her that a compilation of his poems was put together in Leaves of Grass. She responded with, “I never heard of it.”
In all fairness to her, not all English majors have an extensive knowledge of literature, many of them focus instead on writing, grammar, vocabulary and usage, which led me to the main reason that I was speaking to her. I frequently illustrate that women think in pictures and speak in nouns and adjectives, whereas, men think in concepts and speak in verbs and adverbs. Unfortunately I could not make the point because she didn’t know a verb from an adjective.
This young woman was undaunted by the conversation and informed me that she would probably go back to school to get a Master’s in psychology. The tragedy of our educational system is that she probably will.
Not only will she most likely get an advanced degree but operating in our recitorial credentialized society she might end up with authority over teachers specializing in children with learning disabilities in English.
The educational system turns out high school graduates that do not know a verb from a noun, and colleges in turn graduate them without having taught them the difference while somehow with a straight face certifying that they warrant a degree.
A test given to high school graduates in America 60 years ago and then given to college seniors 50 years later, resulted in the college seniors not doing as well as the high school graduates 50 years earlier. In practical terms, this means if you are a college student, your grandmothers and great-grandmothers who graduated from high school know more than you do. I went to school with your grandmothers and great-grandmothers and can assure you that they know more than you. They also can darn a sock and dress a chicken.
This bit of information does not faze college women because they do not go to school to learn. As said earlier, everything a woman does is to excel at what is expected of her. Today she is expected to get a college degree. It does not matter that she is not learning anything other than to do the reciting necessary to fulfill that requirement; our credentialized society will provide her an employment opportunity based on the credential indicating her recitorial skill. That is the current premise for her going to college; however, fulfilling that premise has become increasingly difficult.
At the beginning of this essay I indicated that the goal of education should be completed by high school graduation. Most learning after that is vocational in nature. How much vocational training do we need? Nearly half of employed college graduates in the United States hold down jobs that don’t require a four-year college education – including 323,000 waiters and waitresses, 116,000 janitors and cleaners, and 83,000 bartenders.
A report from the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity discloses that 37 percent of employed college graduates are in jobs requiring no more than a high-school diploma, and 11 percent are in occupations requiring more than a high-school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree.
About five million college graduates are in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says don’t even require a high-school education.
Women, enticed out of the home, removed from the skills that the home provided, motivated to attend college where little is learned, saddled with the debt of educational costs, turned loose on a declining market for what little skills they had, become wards of the state—the primary reason for the entire process.
The vocation of women for millennia has been to bring forth life and to nurture it. The vocation of men has been to provide the environment and means for women to do that as we all grow spiritually. These activities are no longer held in high esteem. Making money has top priority now. That’s called whoredom; prophets from the first book of the Bible to the last have railed against individual whoredom and national whoredom, pointing out that focus on the material world inhibits spiritual growth.
The recitorial society does not recognize the unseen world, and can only deal with what it sees such as symptoms and effects. We have shown that moral behavior comes from unseen ethics, and the vocations of nutrition, social work, and the law–all based on what is seen—are ineffective in serving the physical and moral well-being of society.
The next recitorial society essay will address the entrepreneurial activities of women as they leave the supposed drudgery of homemaking
E.G.
