Patreon

Comic Vote

Reddit

Wiki

Discord

Xmas list

Education, at every level, is one of the most broken aspects of American culture over the last, at least, 50 years. It’s lost a lot of focus. I lived through an era of decay. Teachers getting slowly worse as I aged, systems breaking down, failure mounting upon failure. I was lucky enough to go to elementary school in a small town where things were “backwards” by modern standards. It gave me a foundation that allowed me to teach myself as the system crumbled around me. As long as you can read well you can teach yourself damn near anything you might need in everyday life. Once we moved to a larger town my education became scattershot. Large splatters of random information without any illustration of function. The dates of the American revolution, for example, aren’t as important as the causes of it, or the reactions to those causes, or why those people, at that point in history, reacted the way they did. I didn’t learn about the philosophy of the enlightenment until later, and on my own. The loner things went to worse the problem got. Key elements left out, or glossed over. Significant parts of the story ignored in favor of a timeline. I also caught the very beginnings of the anti-science movement at the tail end of my education. When teachers had to tell us that evolution is “just a theory” without explaining the difference between the meanings of those words in common parlance versus use in a scientific discussion. Again, I learned those distinctions on my own.

Artistically is got a wide array of general study, but there was never any mention of how a person survives with art as a profession. No one ever says anything about how you have to become a business person. Things like contracts, taxes, and so on, are never mentioned. In spite of the fact that art exists in every aspect of daily life it’s looked upon as a worthless endeavor. Some artist designed all your clothes, your coffee cup, the can the coffee came out of, and on down the line, but no one ever acknowledges it. It’s insane if you think about it.

Anyway, eventually, once things break down completely, people will come along and sort things out, but that’s what it will take. Humans generally don’t plan in advance, they react.