We had academicsatire.com online a few years back and got a good reaction to the site, but then we had to take a break to guide our child through the slings and arrows of outrageous education.

We had her in the local school system through the fifth grade, where she learned to follow rules, that most teachers are bullies collecting a paycheck, how to be a bigot (lessons of the schoolyard), and that she would never find her peers until college. That was her second grade teacher’s excuse for never getting around to implementing a supposedly mandated program for the officially designated smart kids.

In the sixth grade, we tried a charter school, which turned out to be an even bigger disaster, because the charter school, that year, had just gotten financial support from the local school district for the first time, which meant mandated (more mandates) open enrollment, which meant the charter school got the dregs of the local school system. The camping trip at the end of the year included orienteering taught by a teacher who knew nothing about declination and camp recreation that consisted of boys chasing each other around with sharpened sticks. The barely supervised tribal behavior resulted in one arrest. Seriously. One of the boys had to be arrested for beating up another kid.

So we went the homeschool route with a distance education component and more fights with benighted educators. The distance assistant principal thought letting kids fail was a good idea. It helped them learn. No, they did not allow revisions of written work; the graders they hired simply didn’t have time to offer feedback on drafts even though modern rhetorical research recognized the importance of revision. You get a grade and that’s it. Judgement day.

But our child was (and is) about as motivated as a kid can get and studied her butt off and finished the SAT with 99th percentile verbals, but her overall score wasn’t enough for National Merit status, and we’re not rich, so she was accepted by semi-elite schools on the East Coast, which is where she wanted to be. Had to see the East Coast, the big cities, the bright lights, and you know the rest.

At this overpriced, semi-elite school, she was “tripled” in the dorm her first year, which meant being crammed into one room with two other freshpeople. One of the three dropped out after a week, the other turned on my daughter and moved out after the end of the first semester. That turned out to be a benefit to my daughter, who had the whole room to herself for spring semester. Housing sent her four potential roommates during the semester: one told my daughter she did her homework and then watched television each evening, the second told my daughter that her boyfriend would be staying with them during the semester, the third liked to get drunk (like most other kids on campus) each weekend, and the fourth decided she didn’t want to move after all. She decided to stay put and work it out with her current roommate and that roommate’s boyfriend.

That stimulating frosh social life took place in a dorm made of cement where every sniff or cough echoed up and down the halls, where everyone got drunk and loud on the weekends and stumbled back to bed at 2 am. Party, party. Of course, the school adapted to student behavior and didn’t bother serving breakfast until 10 am on weekends. To bad if a student kept sane hours and actully got up on the weekends.

Somehow my daughter survived and managed to finish fall semester on the dean’s list. Probably because she left her dorm room each evening, rain or shine, to find a place to study on campus and studied on the weekends (some of the time). But maintaining sanity that first semester was a major chore, and she flew home each chance she had to get away from the mean streets of her well manicured campus.

And there was one dorm lockdown due to a shooting in a parking lot after a dance, but that’s another entry here, along with reports on the teaching (or lack thereof) encountered by our daughter.

Yes, nothing has changed since we first put academicsatire.com online, except the price of tuition. Just a new generation suffering through the absudities of education, lower and higher. It’s just as corrupt as ever. Of course, the purpose of any college or university education is to learn how to survive mindless, heartless bureaucracies.

–the editors
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