Philosophy 1 (Light and Dark)

This isn't Dazibao in that, being philosophical it's not really meant to convert a lot of people to our cause. It's just me, musing about life, but you can feel free to pass them around if you want. Most of the things here are metaphorical. In the post below, for example, I refer to the Light and the Dark as two components of the spirit, however Light and Dark do not, to my knowledge, physically exist except as a particle/wave and the absence thereof. I use them as metaphors in the post below.

There are two basic components to the human spirit. The Light, the good side, contains our hopes and our dreams, our empathy and our compassion. This side is what makes us want to become a Hollywood script writer, start our own business, or find the cure for cancer. It wants to accomplish things, to be important. It is ambition and love. This side of us is the force for progress in the world.

The Dark side of the spirit, on the other hand, contains our primal desires, our anger and our lust. It’s what makes us want to lash out at the people who hurt us, shut ourselves in our room for the rest of the day when life goes horribly wrong, or fill our days with cheap, hollow thrills. It wants to have fun right now and worry about the future when it gets here. It broods, it hates, and it lusts. This side of us is primarily a force for decay.

If my reputation has preceded me, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with the public education system. Well, guess for me which side the public education system wants you to embrace. Given I don’t like the public education system at all, you’d probably think the Dark. Wrong. The Dark is rebellious and angry, and doesn’t want to do homework.

But the Light isn’t very useful either. The Light wants to chase dreams and make the world a better place. You can’t do that in school. Being told to sit down, shut up, and do your homework (sometimes in as many words) is not good for the Light. The best you can get from Light is to say "Okay, fine, I guess I have to get a diploma in order to get out into the wide world, so wake me up when we're done with school." But that doesn’t add up. If the system doesn’t want you to be Dark and it doesn’t want you to be Light, what does it want?

It wants neither. It wants your spirit gone. Dead, or at least in a coma. They don’t acknowledge it, of course. Not many people could live with themselves if they woke up every day, looked in the mirror, and said “I’m going to crush hundreds of human spirits today!” They honestly think they’re helping you. But the Dark and the Light are what make life fun. Darkness may be ultimately self-destructive, but at least it feels good in the moment. Light, of course, is hard at the start but simply so much more fun in the end, because unlike the Darkness, where there’s really no point to anything you do except to do it, Light let’s you win at life. The void doesn't feel good at all. And whether they’ll admit it to themselves or not, the purpose of the public education system is to generate high test scores, and they aren’t about to let your spirit get in the way of that.

No, the public education system wants your spirit to be neither Light nor Dark, it wants your spirit to be a void, to be Nothing. Nothing, when your dreams are crushed and even your cynical, jaded Darkness has scurried off, when you become like a living machine, no longer truly enjoying even such simple pleasures as the taste of good food. I know that can’t possibly sound anything like good to the teachers and bureaucrats reading this, but ask yourself, while you obviously advise your students to avoid drugs, how often do you tell them to follow dreams? And I don't mean just saying the words, how often do you actually help them? And no, helping them graduate doesn't count, because the whole point of the ELF movement is that the education system is an obstacle getting in the way of life instead of a tutorial to prepare you for it, that it shouldn't be an obstacle, and that we intend to change it.

But what I have little doubt of is that almost every teacher reading this, at one time, did want their students to follow their dreams. They probably went into teaching with something like a hope of helping students realize them. And that’s my dream, too. A world with a school system that helps its students instead of squashing them like bugs.

-Ashen