In another post, I put up a list of some of the most successful people in the world that did not go to college. What you find on that list, besides a lot of actors and entertainers that equate to those fortunate enough to strike gold, are many, many billionaires that founded major companies from Dell computer, to the Walt Disney Company.

From my own college experience, I understand clearly what the problem is. Education can only give you some of what you need. Most of the work of starting something from nothing can’t be taught, and if your goal is success, that inspiration has to come from someplace deep inside. Is there a teacher out there that can teach someone to be Richard Branson, George Lucas, or Bill Gates? If they could they would. But they can’t, in fact, a lot of the time, the teacher teaches because they aren’t good at actually doing things in the real world.

So that leaves me to question the validity of the entire institutional system. Now that the Lakota Levy is over, at least this time around, I think it’s time to bring to question what the value of education actually is.

The difficulty in determining the value of education is that so many have built secure incomes off education. What brought the whole issue to my mind was the book Forbidden Archeology which showed to what extremes universities suppressed scientific evidence discovered in the field of archeology and anthropology. The reason for the suppression was to protect their previous scientific finds and the legacy of those revelations, so new evidence was a threat to the security built on those reputations.

To keep it clear sports is the best explanation. Consider what the NFL would be like if great teams were always allowed to draft first in each years draft class. The NFL to keep things competitive and entertaining, created salary caps, so teams would have to make decisions on who they could keep on their teams, and who’d be let go. And they came up with the idea of letting teams with the worst record draft first in the following year’s draft. That way, new teams are always emerging as good teams and competition is always evolving. And we all benefit from the entertainment value.

But in education, we are still teaching kids the same way we did at the turn of the century, even though new methods and computer technology allow for other options. We still have schools shutting down in the summer even though that concept was started to let young men help their fathers on the family farms during harvest season. But, teachers unions have kept that going for the sake of benefits.

I would argue that a teacher standing in the front of a room and teaching as an authoritarian on the given subject is an archaic method long outdated. I would say that teaching children to stand in line at lunch, to stand in line when they walk down the hall to go to recess, to walk in line to go to an assembly, to stand in line for attendance in gym class, and so on and so on are psychologically bad for the development of young people. Because what it teaches them is to follow orders. In the education system we currently have, following orders is the emphasis, and I would argue that mentality is completely wrong for American society.

I can hear you groaning right now dear reader. I can hear your questions. But understand something in my explanation here, I am questioning the very foundation upon which everything is built, because to my eyes it is not perfect, and does not produce the type of individuals American society needs, so it is subject to ridicule. It is quite probable that you as the reader are a victim to a lifetime of acceptance to this established system, so to question it will be difficult for you. I understand.

But, for the sake of this article, forget everything you ever learned, and suspend your belief system and look with the eyes of a person new to the culture you exist in, and enjoy the revelations that befall you.

Consider for a moment how idiotic the hazing rituals of college are. The drinking games, the insults from your peers, the ridiculous dares that take place, the structure of those rituals are technically insane. But is it a mystery as to why those belonging to a fraternity have a network from which to launch their careers? Isn’t it strange the rituals of the bachelor party which seem to be important to many males, especially those belonging to fraternities where their “brotherhood” reflects a deep bond that exceeds or equals the bond with the wife to be. And to the sorority sisters the same mentality holds true. The night before their weddings is inundated with penis worship. The women, particularly sorority sisters gather and bond among rituals of drinking and male strippers. But why? What is to be accomplished in these ceremonies? If you are an employer, and are looking for a nice obedient employee that will know their place and not challenge the authority structure, a frat boy is an attractive option, because they know their place. And in the scope of these rituals as the participants emerge into marriage, the brothers and sisters have a shared secret that bonds them, and ensures the continuation of the bond in respect to the new marriage. Secrets create a bond.

With fraternities and sororities, which serve basically the same role as the military soldier that gets off the bus and is yelled at by a drill sergeant prior to getting their hair cut, which is the beginning of a mental transformation as an individual and into the collective identity of a soldier. And thus, are the two primary paths that young people take after high school. Now during high school and grade school there are many smaller rituals that occur. By the time a youngster is a senior in high school, they know their peer groups. They know where they fit into the social stratus, and this seems to be the number one goal of grade school. The athletes achieve the top social order. The other students that participate in the extracurricular activities to a lesser degree make up the next. Then you have the scholastically strong, and then you have all the rest to varying degrees down to the rejects that fall through the cracks for various reasons turning to drugs and alcohol earlier than the rest of the young people. The goal of all discussed in this paragraph is to allow the individual to find out where they fit into the peaking order of society.

Now be honest with yourself. What is the greatest concern you had in grade school, or college? How about now? When your neighbor buys a new grill, do you feel the urge to get a new one as well? Do you feel that the car you drive is a display to your neighbors, friends and family to the status of your placement in society? Or your house? Or the wife or husband that you’ve obtained for yourself? What are the true values that you hold dear?

If the values were healthy ones, and you were happy with yourself and your life, then you wouldn’t over-eat and carry around that huge stomach, or that giant caboose, or you wouldn’t be divorced, or on your second or third marriage. You wouldn’t be taking high blood pressure medicine, or taking drugs to deal with depression. If you were happy with your life you would never desire to become drunk, because such a state is an escape from yourself, if only for a short time.

My point is not to lecture you. But it is to point out that if the system worked, then people wouldn’t be broken all around us. It’s not necessarily their fault. They’ve been taught to be broken. They’ve been taught to be only a fraction of themselves. There is an old saying that it is “not good to be too good.” The reason why is that being good, being exceptional, are threats to the animalistic peaking order of our social structure.

I received over the Lakota Levy Campaign letter after letter from angry teachers and parents who want to overlook all the obvious problems of the current system in favor of keeping the system intact. They have completely bought into much of this nonsense, and the prospect that it is all meaningless is just simply too much for them to fathom. They come across sounding like children still developing their emotional states, but the danger is that they are actually parents themselves, passing on to children the same neurotic states they are currently professing.

And I’d be lying if I said I was surprised when the Lakota Levy failed, and there were tears from the people supporting the whole thing. They simply cannot see the phantoms that dictate the funding model. They cannot through their training see beyond the patriotism of their alter mater.

Do you know what alter mater means? It was used in ancient Rome as a title for various mother goddesses. In modern times, it is often a school, college, or university attended during one’s formative years. So throughout the lives of many, their alter mater will always be important to them, a ground for which to place their footing. However, it is tragic that such beliefs do not allow one to see the faults of the system of their upbringing. To see faults for such people is to literally see the faults of ones parents.
Now such a thing does happen when young people move into their teens. They cast off the garb of their parents and move into some of the various paths of institutionalism. Many schools are literally many people’s second mother experience.
I once watched football players reciting the Ohio State song during the conclusion of a football game. And the crowd in the stands was noticeably emotional, so the whole experience was a ceremonial one. The collectivism displayed to me was very disconcerting. To the participants, it was comforting, like a mother’s hug. To me, it was a disgusting display of childlike behavior from what should be grown adults.

So what many of these blind patriots clinging to their alter mater share is that they cannot see what cancers inhabit these mothers, because they are unable to digest the criticism toward a loved one.
What permeates these institutions is a level of socialist thought designed to undermine American society. Such thoughts are foreign to these lovers of their second mothers because to their frail minds, war is always fought with guns and in far away lands. But some wars do not involved physical domination. And they don’t involve guns. But they are psychological warfare initiated during the Cold War to dismantle American society. And it is so subtle that even the people within the system can not see it, because they are too close to see.
And this is the problem with education as an occupation. Through collective bargaining, socialist have dominated organized unions and they have made it very lucrative through their use of Saul Alinskey to drive wages up to levels that caused people not to question their methods, because the money they offer brings a level of comfort to the participants of the union. But what is really happening is that in exchange for that income, teachers and administrators are willing to sacrifice their personal freedoms in exchange for that secure middle class income. And that is the strategy of socialists, is to bring down the top level achievers to create a collective middle class. And they have established themselves in our education systems.

I read a book called the Frontiersman several years ago by the great author Alan Eckart and I was shocked that the first time I ran into that material I was as a grown man, because honestly I should have been given that book when I studied Ohio History in the fourth grade. The book may be a bit too hard of a read for a fourth grader, but it certainly should have been recommended reading by 8th grade. The book chronicles the life of Simon Kenton and his battles with the Indian leaders such as Tecumseh and Blue Jacket. It features Daniel Boone, George Washington, and many other characters critical to life on the frontier in 1750 on. It is action packed and shows Indians eating settlers. It has graphic battles and shows the treachery capable between the French and the English. It is a marvelous book.
But in school, I was taught that Indians were Native Americans with an emphasis on the encroachment of the white man upon Native American land. I was taught that slavery was all important instead of one part of the history of the United States. I was taught the merits of feminism. The merits of tolerance, and on and on along those lines. It was dreadfully boring. In fact I remember asking my eight grade English teacher why we had to read Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. I asked the same question to my ninth grade teacher, where we read the same material again. It wasn’t till I was in my thirties that I read for the first time Titus Andronicus. And I asked, “Why did I not read this in the eighth grade!” I would have read all of Shakespeare by the conclusion of my eighth grade year for fun if I had known that Titus was such a great play! But I had to discover that on my own, away from schools unfortunately.

On of the times I went to college, on the first day of school in my philosophy class the professor instructed us that we would begin a study of Tao Te Ching, a book I had read on my own over a weekend a couple of years earlier. I took three classes and realized I was wasting my time. I already had developed leadership skills at the time that companies would be willing to hire me for. I thought a degree would help me in some way, but I found that to not be the case once I had started working and developed a network to work within, because companies always need leadership. But what did I need out of a college that spent three weeks studying a book that the students should read over the weekend? I saw the same blank looks on my class mates in college that I saw in high school; the “I have to be here” look “so I can get a certification,” so I can get a good job. I decided in that philosophy class that the instructor was just going through the motions. He was just studying what had come, and he had no ambition to produce something for the future. He was just collecting a paycheck, like the rest of the professors. It looked like a big scam to me, all three times that I went, I always came back to the same conclusion.
I also have recollections of a high school party that I once went to where I sat in the living room of a nice Lakota home where the parents were out of town, and the kid that lived their had a party where most of the senior and junior class showed up. MTV was a rather new thing back then, and was on in the living room and a bunch of kids were watching a video of Pink Floyd’s The Wall playing. Most of the room was smoking pot and drinking voracious amounts of alcohol. I sat stunned even then at the herd like mentality of the kids. I did not participate in their drunken splendor or the mind numbing drugs. I was happy to talk to a girl that wanted some male company, but that’s all I wanted from such events. The social aspect of those events meant nothing.

I saw the same kind of mentality from the college kids at Miami University where I went to see a girl I knew at the time there. She was in a massive sorority party that took up an entire apartment complex. Every room I’d go in had kids smoking pot. Some of the rooms were the size of a large closet and might have 20 to 50 people packed into them all passing around a joint. The girl I went to see had given oral sex to at least two guys that I knew of that night. One of the guys was engaged to be married to a girl that was in the other room with a room full of guys passed completely out and had lost every bit of her cloths. Nobody cared. I see these type of events glorified in films like Hangover, which I thought was funny, but if you think about it, we’ve all come to accept the term, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” We don’t bat an eye at such despicable behavior. Rather, it is common now. We send our daughters to school, and pay small fortunes to do so. And we watch secretly those same girls our daughter’s age stripping off their tops and going topless in spring break activity which we endorse with our barbaric lust. And we tell our sons to take all the women they can while they still can, before they reduce themselves to the marriage to one woman for the rest of their lives.

I went to such events completely sober and watched with distance. Later that same night the friends I went to the party with, who were drunk got into a fight with the football team for the university. It was comical and easy to win a fight against a mob of drunken fools. But my friends ended up in jail while I had the presence of mind to leave the scene while police cleaned up the bodies like they were shoveling snow. The university covered for the football players, who actually started the fight. My friends were released once they sobered up. While that was going on, I sat in a Wendy’s by myself and watched late into the early morning the foolish college kids, many of which were older than me at the time, living a life style of complete recklessness, and I sat there reading my book, Yeager, which was about the life of Chuck Yeager, a person I greatly admire.

I could literally tell you thousands of such stories, because for a time in my late teens and into my early twenties, when the world told me to be one way, and that I had to travel down this college path, or that military path, I rejected both. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with either system. Actually, I became something of an outlaw in the eyes of society, until I meant my wife just before one of the worst car wrecks I had ever been in, the second car crash that had taken place at over 100 mph in a year. Neither time was I the driver. At that time I married her, and retired to a life of reading, which I have done ever since. And I have found that college was breeding sheep. I craved to live the life of a lion. You have to decide in life whether you’re going to be the hammer or the nail. The education system like any good factory is producing millions and millions of nails. But only the hand crafted craftsman is making hammers. And my becoming a hammer was forged with much pain, but it has been a journey well worth taking.
So my opinions come from a source of personal observation where I looked at the facts, and asked the question as to where this was going. And I rejected it in favor of my own education. And I will say that at the time, Chuck Yeager had more to do with that than anyone.
Yeager had shot down more enemies in a single day than anyone else in the European theater during World War II in his Mustang and he wasn’t a college trained pilot. He had raw instinct that always gave him an edge over everyone else. I shared with Chuck lightning reflexes that I used when driving and racing cars illegally, and a raw nerve that helped me in many circumstances. Yeager had those traits and that is why he developed into a world class test pilot for the Air Force. He developed a great relationship with engineers who lacked Chuck’s natural ingenuity. And it was because Chuck was a rare breed of man even for that time that allowed him to break the sound barrier in the X-1 over the civilian pilot Slick Goodlin who demanded $150,000 to fly the X-1. Chuck did it because he just wanted to do it. So he was in it for the right reasons.

I can relate.

Such images had a powerful impact on me that I carried all my life. I am proud to report that I have always taken that stance even when the temptation of powerful politics and business influence dangled the carrot in front of my face. I decided that I’d rather be my own man; self made that no alter mater could take credit for. And if society didn’t like it, to hell with them! At the end of my life, I’d have a clean soul and I’d be proud of it.
Of course taking such a stance will get you into a lot of trouble, and it has. One notable time that involved a labor union that I was actually in, yet I refused to pay dues to them, didn’t like the idea that I was asked to work the weekend at a company I worked for, because union rules said the foreman should have asked the employees with more seniority first, caused a massive stink, which caused four of the shop stewards to corner me in the bathroom for a fight. I had a reputation of fighting one on one, so they decided that four of them might intimidate me. It didn’t.
We agreed to meet after work so none of us would get fired. I went to the agreed upon vacant lot to meet these guys for a fight. And guess what, they didn’t show up. I was there by myself watching these tough union stewards driving up and down the road revving up their engines trying to intimidate me like some silly animal making noise to frighten their pry. Only they didn’t know what to do when I wasn’t frightened by their actions.
It is clear to me where civilization fails, and when good people trade away their freedoms for a bit of security, something dies in them. And you can see it on their faces. Their skin is dying prematurely. Their health is usually bad, or is going bad. They usually can’t endure much by way of stress. In men, they suffer from erectile dysfunction, in women a lack of desire for the act. And all this starts with the values we give to ourselves through our education system which clearly extends beyond reading, writing and arithmetic.
So when those carcasses of living flesh proclaim to me that I cannot teach a class-room, or that I did not get a college degree, or that I did not follow down a path that they understand, and therefore cannot understand their situation, they are like children asking me to explain something that they do not have the life experience yet to understand, because they have not yet lived life. And in many cases, that includes those that are ready to retire from a life they consider hard work, and they are ready to collect that pension they worked hard to preserve. I can not explain to them the sound of the wind, or the heat of the sun, when they have lived their whole lives confined to the controlled circumstances of academia, and the powers that perpetuate political influence from that platform.

To say that in this day an age education is a must for success and that no longer can people do as Chuck Yeager did, because these days you must have college. Those are only the rules of established society, and companies that continue to advocate such beliefs will continue to find that the employees they take out of the education system are watered down products not quite up to the tasks they are looking for. The exceptional find such restraints too confining and the best of the best reject it all together willing to suffer the lack of security for the clear vision being free of obligation to alter maters provides.
I would dare say that the success of Glenn Beck is a modern example of just such a philosophy. He stays ahead of the curve and is clear in his outlooks because he does not have the burden of being educated not to see. How many people have come along like Walt Disney, a guy with only a high school education, much like Glenn Beck? Steven Spielberg also didn’t have a college education when he was doing his best stuff. And now that he’s bought in to some of the progressive philosophies, his ability to wield the magic of the past is gone. It’s gone from him as a filmmaker.



So what conclusion can we make? Are the most successful among us freaks of nature, beyond the scope of normal mankind? Is it impossible to think that the kid living next door to you may not be the next Walt Disney? I would say that our education system as it currently is dotted with a socialist mentality from grade one to the doctorate in college, is teaching us not to reach for the stars, and to settle for the muddy middle where a strong middle class promises a life of few lows in life, but also few highs either. And a rather eventless story at the end of one’s personal book only to be lost in the annuals of time, where much bolder and action packed stories will reside in the memory of the human race.
And do not think that the conventional path taken is the path of purity, and do not subject those that reject your choice with additional taxes. I respect your decision to live a life as described in this article. But don’t ask me to fund such a despicable existence.

Rich Hoffman

www.overmanwarrior.com