(The below is a post that I shared on my blog that came from a forum that I’m a part of.)
Let’s break it down from the beginning:
You're born into this world knowing absolutely nothing as a baby; you're innocent and dependent on parents and the good will of other human beings to feed you and keep you alive. As you grow older, your mind is accumulating data, because by nature, growing up means that you become less dependent on others for your survival. This is very clear in children. Your body grows at an insane rate as a child; your senses develop as well, all for the sake of improving your chances of surviving, by becoming stronger and proactive. As you grow, you get stronger, faster, smarter, etc. Throughout this time, you're learning more about the universe, attaining knowledge, so you don't have to ask questions or seek guidance from other people - this is what I mean when I use the word "education": it's a natural progression that is innate in human beings, who want to conquer the universe, so that they can lead more independent lives without any fear.
When you first start going to most public schools, is where "education" actually stops or slows down. See, as a child, when you're picking up all this information, you're picking up information for the sole purpose of survival; when you go to school, you're picking up information for the sole purpose of gaining a teacher's approval; this is where servitude begins, as early as preschool! Up until that time, you were learning for solely your own benefit, anything you chose to learn or were interested in, you were emotionally and intellectually invested in, because you as a child, believed this thing would contribute to your liberty. In school, you're restricted, you can't move as you wish, you can only ask a certain amount of questions, you can't pursue every interest you want, you are put into a condition of dependency, by an employee and institution of the state.
In order to understand this, you must understand the difference between education and schooling; education is what we do all our life, which we use to navigate through existence; whereas schooling, like we see in fish, is simply us replicating what someone we deem wiser, or of higher authority, is telling us to do. When you get that, you realize that a degree isn't what this is all about. Trust me I know this is hard to accept, but simply sit down and entertain the thought for a while. Once you do, it will become clear to you that the end goal of an "education" ought to be independence, and the end goal of "school" ought to be replication. This is why we go to school, so we can seem more qualified for "jobs." Who has the jobs that we're fighting for: the corporations and the government mostly, the people who already have power and want us to serve them and keep them in their position.
When you and others talk about a liberal arts degree, you're really talking about a liberal arts schooling, which by definition differs from a liberal arts education. The confusion between schooling and education is a result of over a 100 years of propaganda that came about when corporations (represented by the Republican party today) and progressive politicians (represented by the Democratic party today) in the late 19th century joined forces to turn America into a super power. Once they combined, they decided they were going to reform the educational system so that they could produce a public that served that interest, which is why we all are required by law to go to school by a certain age. The powerful, knowing what they were doing, set up private schools for the gifted and their children, so that they could lead us, by offering them "education," while we were offered "schooling." There's a reason why Obama wasn't dumb enough to put his kids into a public school.
The best way to get a liberal education, even though I've talked about the trivium and quadrivium, is really about you always asking yourself, how is this thing I'm learning going to contribute to my independence and survival as a human being. This mindset is what is essential, not the school or the degree. Survival and independence are the main goal of an education; not the approval of elites and the regurgitation of unproven and untested facts. This is also why a liberal education, must consist of "logic or the dialectic" aka critical thinking; this is the tool that human beings naturally have to use when people are trying to use words or propaganda to guide them against their survival or self-interest. Why do you think in most cases whether it be in churches, school, politics, activist groups, social movements, cults, etc. the leaders are always trying to have you sacrifice yourself to their own survival and independence, at the cost of your own?
This is how the game works, ladies and gents. –Wizdom, Courtesy of UPA (July 3, 2013) (Comment)
I know in the last couple of days, many people have seen Rachel Jeantel on the stand for the Zimmerman case. The right wing media has made a lot of mockery of her speech and the way she conducts herself; it's quite clear that she doesn't conduct herself in a way that we think an educated person might act, and many liberals and black people have responded to this fact by blaming racism, intolerance, and our lackluster schools. There's something much deeper going on, and I want to address it here and connect it to being a free black person along with game.
First, let’s roll back the clocks and go back to ancient Greece; in Greece there were only two classes of people: there were the free men, and then there were the slaves. Free men didn't work; slaves did work (This kind of slavery was different from what we popularly refer to as slavery today). Due to this kind of divide in society, free people and slaves got different kinds of educations. The free ones got a liberal education; the slaves got a servile education. The servile education consisted not merely of basic cotton picking or things similar to what black slaves did in America, but Greek also slaves got taught to be teachers, doctors, engineers, etc. What the free ones got was different - their education was divided into two parts: the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium consisted of developing communication skills (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) and the Quadrivium consisted of learning tools that could be used to measure and observe nature (Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy.)
Basically, the free men were trained in all the things they would need to lead and control the servile class. The training they got, since it helped them understand nature and how to use language to control and please the masses, made it easy for them to learn anything, whether it was engineering, medicine, law, etc., and because it was so easy for them to learn that they were like CEOs: they didn't waste their time working, rather they used most of their time improving their methods of managing human beings and putting their wisdom into practice. This educational divide still exists today, and Rachel Jeantel is a prime example of someone who has undergone such a servile education.
Frederick Douglass never went to school; in fact, the one book he read, which he claimed was responsible for the man he would become and his political career, was the Columbian Orator: a book on rhetoric. The book gave him the skill to communicate complex ideas, and simply by reading this book, he was able to lead black people to their freedom and succeed in America. Simply by knowing how to speak, not because of some teacher's sympathy, but based on his own will and effort, he was able to surpass the vast majority of white people in power and significance. Malcolm X is another prime example of how simply knowing how to speak with power and authority can bring a man to freedom and greatness, without ever doing any physical labor in his life. Imagine if these men and others like them had been given a complete liberal education; or imagine if even 5% of black people actually had it, what chaos would ensue in this nation.
The powers that be do not want a public, and that includes people of all races, and that comprises of mostly free people. When black people got their freedom in the 1860's, they simply got upgraded from slaves to servants. Our schooling system is basically, young people fighting to be highly paid servants; the better the school, the better life you can have. The only schools where people get a liberal education are in private schools, not even in universities. Much of the black people you hear, talking highly about how "educated" they are, are really saying that they are a much better-paid servant then you are.
Coming back to Rachel Jeantel, why she's there is not because of mere racism, that is simply short-sighted thinking; she speaks the way she does by design, and the design isn't going to change through politics (aka the Democratic party for black folks) - she's just slightly worse off than most of us more educated folks, who have been given a better servile education, which we probably paid for and are still paying for. A liberal education, on the other hand, is available, and you don't have to pay a dime to get it, just like game; however, nobody is going to give it to you or force-feed it into your mind. There is a momentous power that comes from knowing how the power of words, which increases a thousand fold once you understand the workings of nature (it is very likely that the Greeks developed this educational method from Ancient Egypt); which most of us on here try to utilize solely for seducing women; however, once again, that is short-sighted. We're dealing with heavy artillery here, and people need to recognize that because a lot of the questions people ask show that they don't understand the magnitude of what this is all about. –Wizdom, Courtesy of UPA (June 28, 2013) (Post)
That's real game. I feel like many people discuss the problems we face in an in-depth fashion but fail to acknowledge the solutions to these ever present problems with a critical yet constructive eye to the younger generations so, can you talk about the process of obtaining the "free liberal education?" That question is open to anyone with the knowledge, wisdom and experience. –boy billion, Courtesy of UPA (June 28, 2013) (Comment)
Well, before you even pick up a book, you have to work on ridding yourself of the servile education you've had. In servile education, you learn from a master, and you do what the master tells you to do: the master could be a professor or a teacher, and you need to get good grades to gain the master's favor, so that's what you seek out to do. Like many people in school, you don't read books because they can benefit your life, but you read books because you have to read them in order to pass, and in most cases you end up hating those books and not gaining anything useful out of them. To start off with a liberal education, you have to stop relying on masters, and you have to stop respecting them as such. A liberally educated person views wise people as mentors: people who know something they don't, but are not any better than them; they are people whom you go to soak information from with the purpose of using it and then hopefully surpassing them.
Once you accept the fact that you don't need or want a master, you have to spend some time meditating and really evaluating yourself and who you are. What makes you weak, where are you ignorant, what makes you fearful? This requires the highest level of honesty; it's like psychotherapy without a psychologist. Once you figure out the things that you have that need work, you can start picking out books to read that address your weaknesses. As you read these books, though, you're not reading them for "facts" to memorize (this is servile education), rather you're trying to look for a formula to derive, that helps you understand the "nature" of the thing that you're trying to overcome. The big difference between a servile education and a liberal education is that in the former, the student merely looks to memorize factual information and wishes to duplicate it; whereas in the latter, the student seeks to understand the nature of the information and wishes to use it so he can turn his dreams and desires into reality.
Once you are in the right mind, you can start pursuing a liberal education; the younger you are, the better it will be for you. There is no formal way of acquiring it because it's really up to you: you choose your mentors, you choose your pace, you choose your books, and there are no masters: only guides and short-term mentors. You can easily learn grammar, logic and rhetoric even without books, simply watch a bunch of great speeches on YouTube and study the nature of the speech, trying to figure out what moves the crowd; how are words said, what impact do they have on the people who hear them; pace, delivery etc. You can learn the quadrivium through understanding basic math and how it explains how the universe works. You can learn music through understanding how various sounds affect emotions; all in all, it's the nature or the formula you wish to acquire for your own use, you don't simply wish to replicate. –Wizdom, Courtesy of UPA (June 28, 2013) (Comment)
The trivium and the quadrivium do not equal a modern day liberal arts degree. In fact all our degrees today came from us copying the Prussian educational system: an educational system designed to produce researchers and specialists whose main purpose is to work for the state and its corporations aka a servile education as in you're "serving" those who already have power over you, rather than competing against them. The trivium is not about a degree; hell, it's not really about formal schooling; it's about nature. In nature, everything exists, and one small thing affects the other thing; thus the main purpose of learning the Trivium is about learning how to get a grab on data (grammar), use it and combine it with other data without contradictions (logic) and then creating something original (rhetoric).
Most of us can do this; most of us learn naturally that way, which is why kids can learn languages so easily early on. However, our educational system, the servile educational system, instead of guiding us towards a greater understanding of nature and creativity, guides us towards specialization and single-mindedness, which of course spurs the economy, but also ensures that the vast majority of wealth stays in the elite's hands, because while our education produces an employee mentality, their education produces a CEO mentality. CEO's aren't specialists, they might have degrees in one thing or another, but the reason they reach that status is because they can see things in terms of the big picture: the specialist, can only see things through his expertise, and rarely if ever, gets the opportunity to be the boss in charge. –Wizdom, Courtesy of UPA (July 1, 2013) (Comment)
This is real shit. I remember peeping game when Prince William got married, and I was on my Prynce shit I was really studying dude hard. Moreover, before their televised wedding, they broadcasted a small documentary on the upbringing of Prince William, and in short, this drop is everything he said out his mouth that he was raised upon and taught at birth more than anything!!! Moreover, he really stressed this point. His mother also stressed and highlighted this point in the documentary. This subject was also backed by home/televised videos of the Prince at a very young age like 3, 4, and 5 displaying his "education" in public with the public/common folks. Moreover, how much his mother stressed that his job was to manage people's emotions and make them feel comfortable.
I.e. a Gentleman <----- the etymology of this word Is beyond that of a Mack and in direct alignment with an *Urban Renaissance Man*
This to me is the Holy Grail of posts for me on this board! –Highlife Phi, Courtesy of UPA (July 1, 2013) (Comment)
The thing I think that some are missing when it comes to CEOs and Politicians is they do get Liberal Arts degrees. They just get them earlier on in life through growing up in big business and privates schools. We are not taught liberal arts in high school. We are taught ABOUT the liberal arts then told to be quiet and listen and not talk back to authority; whereas to properly TEACH liberal arts, one has to engage in the acts of liberal arts.
Metaphysics is crazy. Because they are chopping this up on C-Span 2 right now and the chairman of Hewlett-Packard just said publicly that public education was shit and is what's holding America back. –Highlife Phi, Courtesy of UPA (July 1, 2013) (Comment)
Exactly, a lot of these cats went to super prestigious prep schools, day schools, boarding schools, foreign schools, Montessoris, and conservatories. When I was an admissions counselor at the University of Chicago looking at the applications of the kids trying to get in I basically saw my public school education look like dog doo doo next to the kind of education so many of these kids were getting. I remember this one girl from Ohio went to this day-school were the kids come up with their own classes, and so one class she took was on the subject of Jack Kerouac and the Beat movement. The "class" was a two-week field trip revisiting all the places of note Kerouac wrote back in his book On the Road. O_O Another thing that really effed with my spirit was all the kids who had taken Latin in high school when you take Latin you basically know or can figure the meaning of almost any word in the English language and other Romance languages that are Latin-derived. Your command of language becomes incredibly enhanced. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I even interviewed students who had already done lab research at world-renowned research laboratories. -_- -Treezy, Courtesy of UPA (July 1, 2013) (Comment)
A Montessori education is closer to what I'm talking about, as is the education in the elite private schools, which is all done by design, but it's not as efficient since it relies too much on age bracketing and the influence of a pedagogue.
The trivium is not really about learning a subject; it's about developing a method of learning about nature and reality. You learn how to identify data in the grammar stage; you learn how to integrate data in the logic stage, and you learn how to express data in the rhetoric stage, language is merely the starting point, since what's the point of observing and working with data if you can't communicate about it? Once you master this method; you move to the quadrivium, where you learn how to combine numbers with logic to measure the universe and create something out of that knowledge like the Egyptians did when creating the pyramids. Moreover, after that, if you want to learn economics, business, politics, or any other subject, go ahead, you're way ahead of anyone who is currently involved in getting a servile education.
The key thing to remember is that it's not so much about what you're learning but how you're learning it. A servile education is mostly about you learning theories. A trivium-based education is about integrating theory and practice; no such division exists. In a trivium-based education there is a connection between physics and theater; between biology and dance; between history and chemistry: everything is connected in the universe, and thus, everything worth learning is interesting and easy to learn since, the one who sees things in the whole, has a much easier time noticing contradictions and universal truths, than the one who sees things as merely isolated subjects.
Ultimately, like Napoleon implied, the content of an education doesn't matter (i.e. the subjects) as much as the intent, as far as the elite are concerned, school is about indoctrination and loyalty, which is why in elementary school, we pledge allegiance to the flag. Prince William has a degree in geography, just like several people around the world; but I guarantee that his "education" in geography, is far superior to most men living today because I am certain that his came with the foundation of the trivium. –Wizdom, Courtesy of UPA (July 1, 2013) (Comment)
Why is it that children learn languages faster than adults, even though adults have more experience? It's simple really, first they hear the words, and then they associate them with objects or actions, and then they apply it to themselves, and then they express them. They want to figure out how the world works so that they can be independent. Really, as with all things, experience is the best teacher; a pedagogue can only teach you based on their experience or through books that give you the experiences of others, but that only guarantees knowledge, not understanding and wisdom. This is why well-traveled people are so much brighter than people who aren't: they have more diverse data to work with. This is also why in private schools, they encourage kids to be so proactive in the community; like I said in the trivium, there is no such thing as theory vs. practice, like nature they are all interconnected, and that's the thing we don't get in regular public schools, that's why we have few people who are good at math, logic, and other similar courses, but can't communicate or write a decent essay; and we also have people who are great at English or art, but can't think logically, only emotionally. Our public education is designed to make us incomplete human beings as John Taylor Gatto said; thus, we have more interest in entertainment and material things since our education leads us to viewing the world as incomprehensible. –Wizdom, Courtesy of UPA (July 1, 2013) (Comment)
(You can view all of UPA's posts here.)
(The below is a post that commenter Treezy recommended for this post in her comments on the original post. It comes from For Harriet.)
What Black Families Should Know About Liberal Arts Colleges (Post)
You can’t make it a day without hearing about the rising cost of college attendance. Moreover, let’s be honest, our economy isn’t turning around as fast as we’d like. So what can Black students do to afford an education that will help them get ahead? Get into a liberal arts college.
Liberal arts colleges are one of the nation’s best-kept secrets that most Americans know nothing about, especially Black folks. Only 3% of American students will apply to liberal arts colleges, so you know the statistic for African-American students is even more dismal. Moreover, yet, because liberal arts colleges have historically underrepresented Black students, they are desperate to recruit, fund, and graduate them.
After working for three years in multicultural recruitment—my job was essentially to keep my predominantly White college accountable to recruiting and enrolling brown and first-generation students—one of the most frustrating things was how little Black families knew about liberal arts colleges. So here’s my attempt to inform you of what opportunities these institutions provide and give you tips on how to get yourself or your student into one.
What they are: Liberal arts colleges emphasize critical thinking, effective communication (written and verbal), and making broad connections. Translation: If you want to study pre-med, you will primarily focus on health and medicine, but will understand how gender, the economy, and race impact how we understand health and medicine. No tunnel vision allowed.
Whom they want: Students who love learning, working with others, and who are committed to improving their communities. Liberal arts colleges are largely residential, which means that student leadership and involvement reign supreme. If you want to be an effective leader after you graduate, you’ve got to first enjoy learning and collaborating with your classmates.
What they provide: Liberal arts colleges cover the financial costs your family cannot. When a student applies for financial aid, the college will subtract your estimated family contribution from the overall cost of attendance. What remains is the institution’s responsibility to fund in the form of grants, work-study, scholarships, and loans. For competitive Black students with financial need, loans are very low.
Moreover, because they are smaller, liberal arts colleges offer resources that make it hard for students to fall through the cracks. These resources include summer bridge programs, small classes, faculty who care about students beyond the classroom, tutorial services, peer and alumni mentoring opportunities, and one-on-one professional development. As a result of these services, Black students’ graduation rate from a liberal arts college is nearly 40% higher than at public universities.
Now, just because you understand the hidden value of liberal arts colleges doesn’t mean that it will be easy to get into one. Quite the contrary. Liberal arts colleges invest in their students, and that investment demands that students be prepared for the academic rigor of their institution. They also want to see that students are making an informed and well-researched decision to apply. It has to be a mutually beneficial match. Here are three tips that will make admissions officers more likely to say yes to your application.
Take a challenging curriculum: Whether your school offers Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or an equivalent, it’s crucial that you enroll in these courses and earn A’s or B’s throughout high school. The better you perform, the more confident the college will be that you can handle their work.
Remember the rule of 4 X 5: Along with the first tip, you have to take demanding courses in the right areas. Since liberal arts colleges emphasize a broad curriculum, aim to take four years in the five core subjects (English, social science, math, foreign language, and natural science). Keep the pedal on the gas until you graduate.
Visit the school (for free!): One of the best ways to show a college that you’re seriously considering them is to apply for a travel grant during senior year of high school. If you meet their academic requirements, they will fund your campus visit, which will allow you to tour campus, talk to current students, attend classes, and really envision yourself there for four years of your life. Students who are approved for a travel grant stand a very good chance of being admitted.
Whether you, or your student, are a freshman in high school, or a senior currently applying to colleges, it is never too soon to begin thinking about college. Make sure to add a few liberal arts colleges to the list of possible schools. With solid grades in the toughest curriculum—including four years of classes in the core disciplines—Black students place themselves in a strong position for college acceptance. Moreover, with a focus on creating well-rounded scholars, providing services to support students from diverse backgrounds, and making sizeable financial aid amounts available, liberal arts colleges can provide a world-class education to you and your student. Moreover, that’s priceless. -Zahida Sherman, Courtesy of For Harriet (November 2, 2014)
Zahida Sherman works for the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Kenyon College, where she advises and supports underrepresented students. She enjoys international travel, concerts, eating great food, and watching movies. –For Harriet
(You can follow For Harriet on Twitter here. Also, you can follow For Harriet on Facebook here.)
Comments (966)