It's discouraging knowing that my lack of credentials diminishes my scope of influence. I lack credentials because I was born into a family that didn't know how to raise me. I don't blame my parents. I understand that they couldn't do a lot with me. I was not able to keep up my grades in school because there was no cohesion to my family and I was basically on my own from age fifteen, even though I still lived with my mother and for four disastrous months with my father till I was eighteen. There was so much going on in my life that I couldn't really focus much on my school work, which really didn't interest me a lot. I had to move out on my own at age eighteen. There were no options. I had to survive.
When I actually got into community college, just shy of turning 22, my means of survival were very slender, and events turned out that I couldn't continue in school and still survive, since my work in home support was so emotionally demanding, that after a day of giving palliative care and cleaning up excrement, in the evenings I couldn't focus well on classes, so night school was not an option. Neither was finding alternative, less stressful employment.
No supports, and I wasn't strong enough to do it all on my own. I don't think that anyone is really, and those who make this kind of claim, that they did it all on their own, are either liars, or are being very selective with their reporting. I have worked hard at staying as informed and educated as possible, reading widely, doing all kinds of research, becoming fluent in another language, Spanish, travelling, and meeting and befriending as broad a range of humanity as will tolerate me.
Our education system is still strongly skewed towards privilege, and so far nothing is being done to make university a viable option to students on low incomes, who can't even accommodate the punishing student loans and the mammoth debt that will result. But for a lot of us, who are above average intelligent, gifted, curious and want to learn, but still have to struggle to stay alive, there is absolutely nothing to help us stabilize our lives so that we can improve our life situations.
We need, as a society, a good and solid foundation in history, literature, philosophy, psychology, political science, languages, international affairs, etc. as well as every possible opportunity to widen our cultural vision. This is what helps produce thoughtful, thinking, open-minded and compassionate and informed citizens.
We have huge swathes of people who, through no fault of our own, are basically forbidden from accessing this kind of education. We also vote, by the way. And those of us who have not succeeded at least in educating ourselves are going to remain sunk in ignorance, fear, while scraping together our small and very narrow lives that are going to be focussed entirely on our own survival. In the US, it is those same people who elected el presidente Donald Dump who now festers dangerously in the Oval Office.
Last night I listened to the Ideas program on CBC. A prominent university president was being interviewed about the importance of a liberal arts education. I couldn't agree more. But if higher learning is going to remain the purview of the privileged, then, unless the rest of us are deprived of the right to vote, people are going to go on electing dangerous demagogues to the highest positions of elected office. Because they don't know any better. And because we feel left behind.
This needs to be addressed. More, much more needs to be done to assure that we are a nation of enlightened, educated, and empathic citizens with a global vision. As long as we let our governments enslave themselves and the rest of us to market forces, the liberal arts and humanities, which constitute the highest education, are going to remain on the back burner, and we are going to be all the poorer because of it. In fact, our global future depends on the broad availability and dissemination of this kind of education. We are already seeing what can happen without this education being widely available. We have only to listen to workers in the fossil fuel industry in Alberta, for example, as they scream and cry about not wanting to lose their jobs, hang the global consequences and the future of their grandchildren, since they seem so unconcerned and unaware of the impact of their industry on climate change and global warming.
Education should not be the purview of the privileged.
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