/edu/ - Education

>>25438
>ideological brainwashing factories
reactionary drivel

>>25439
That was quick, thank you. This is precisely the kind of thing I would expect to hear at university. Although you did not specify if you have any experience at one, so I will not be taking your comment into account unless you state otherwise.

>>25438
Publish or die is the ethos of American academia if that's your nationality. It's a grueling march of teaching and researching, whether you're paid to do it or not. However, it might be a good idea to consult some of the staff at a local university if you're at a level where you have specific research gaps you know you can fill in–though that's typically where doctoral graduates end up working, and saying you study in your spare time is a big divide between making a career out of it.
>I believe (perhaps mistakenly) that my abilities and knowledge have reached a point of enough breadth and depth to make a career as a philosopher
You should ask a professor of philosophy what their work is actually like. Consult a local university?

I'm just now deciding on whether I'll do grad school, given I have the contacts and ideas to care enough about it. I know as much as I do from being in a similar position of asking whether it's worth investing more time into an industry being attacked in the States.

>brainwashing factories
Depends on the program, I think. Most socsci or philosophy programs push you to think critically, though mileage may vary with program or staff alike.

Yes it is, and everyone honest will say it. They decided who will live and be allowed to have anything. The only thing the universities existed for was Eugenics, and they have sorted the population. You don't "choose" that. It is chosen for you, just like everything else is chosen for you. Those who aren't supposed to be there are given the most degraded education to mock them for their foolishness. In any event, educational institutions are about sorting the population. If you want to learn things, you read books, you do the work on yourself, and you build the thing to perfect that knowledge. You pay attention to what is really happening in the world, which gives many lessons entirely for free. There's no "secret trick" you're going to learn in any educational institution or club. The only information that is a real "trick" is knowing the passwords that gate everything you're allowed to do in this society. None of that is about learning something useful about the world. It's entirely about winning this game that you were destined to lose unless you were chosen to win early in life. They brag, and throw it in your face throughout school, that this is how it works. If you think your choice or agency count for anything, they laugh their asses off at you.

In some places, the initiative of people to do things still matters, but the absolute last place you will find that is education. Education is so committed to this idea of predestination that they will use exemplary violence and cruelty to "correct history", even when this isn't working and doesn't actually give them anything. It's a learned reflex of the institutions and of education in particular.

Don't go to university. Especially don't go if you're older. They look at you really funny if you are a "non-traditional" student who is older, and the very idea that this is non-traditional tells you all you need to know about what universities really are. Why do they insist you have to be led on a railroad through the educational system entirely as they make you? I saw that enough when I was a kid and I wasn't destined for anything or received any special knowledge. I talked about it with other kids from various different places and none of them believed that the system was going to give them a choice. The kids who liked the system were naturally inclined towards viciousness and were already being selected for their future roles. If they look like a potential psychologist in grade school, they're going to be made into that, and they know what they're really looking for (psychologists are all psychopaths and cruel because their job insists on it, and even if the psychologists knows this is a bad thing to do and knows when to turn it off, every single psychologist by the nature of the profession is a psychopath and scarcely bothers to hide it, which they cannot do even if they tried, because psychology is an inquisition and you don't think inquisitors are naive about what that means, do you?).

If only I could tell you how wrong you are about things, and if didn't figure out that you're not supposed to go to university unless you're selected at the right age, you must have something very wrong in you. Many people do, but they usually are told that they are making a mistake if they actually act on these ideas.

I especially don't know what you're worried about if you're a tradesman. Contractors have one of the easiest lives you can have as long as you grease the right wheels and don't go crazy. The particular jobs can be difficult but I've never seen a contractor in the trades claim their work was grueling and exhausting to the point of depleting their body or their soul. There are some rough patches and because the job is fairly cushy, there's going to be a lot of shitty things about the trades.(You should figure out something when the trades are overwhelmingly white men despite them being working class professions that many people can do, and how that system works. You just don't see a black tradesman unless he's semi-rogue and knows he has to stay low about what he does… it happens but they don't want to work with anyone they don't trust. Anyway the trades are decent enough. You do it for the money and you usually have ample free time to do other things, which is why you have the time to beef up your knowledge. Professionals and elites don't really have the time, either because their work consumes all of their free time or because elites are disciplined by each other to maintain lockstep groupthink. If I could be a tradesman that would be great, but I can't work with people and I suck at fixing things.

I would just say: pursue philosophy and things of a higher nature on your own, and don't share anything until you have something good. It will take a while, if you get there. You also have to be very certain that you want to be published, because if you have an actual job, everything you write can be used against you. You don't have any freedom in this society and they really don't like anyone who says no to the slop that is produced to tell you what you are allowed to think and feel. Any philosophy worth reading is going to be contrary to that. For the crime of writing my books, I can't do much else with my life. If I'm "outed", I am to be made ashamed of what I wrote, but even more than that, I am to be ashamed for "not staying in your lane", which is the big obsession of those who do this thing to police what others are allowed to say and think. The insinuation and taboo machine makes it illegal to say innocuous things if they oppose the program, and again, anything that suggests there is any purpose to life or anything you can do is ruthlessly destroyed. It always happens… and the university is the reason why it happens. That is the place that destroys all possible wisdom.

If you are going to write, know that your work will remain obscure and you will not become famous, and no one will agree with you. You can do all of the right things and make something obviously useful, and you won't get anything for it. It's for the best that you don't publish much until you're ready, and then you would either self-publish or diminish what you are doing to those who will allow you to be published. Dirty trick: the "thought controllers" don't really read or care about what you write or believe in, so you can slip a lot past their filter. Just don't get any ideas that the world can change, especially if you have a job that you like. If you have no job, you might get away with more, but then you have no job and you have to live off of begging, and such people are knocked down easily if they dare publish or act because they're guilty of unemployment at the least, and in some cases guilty of some disability or invalidity which is the ultimate crime.

I had a simple rule before I began really writing.
Find something no one else is doing that is useful, learn to do it really well, then do it. Don't wait for permission to act, but act cautiously to protect yourself because you must.
"Useful" is the bugbear that trips people up, because utility is a terrible thing and inserts all manner of ulterior motives into something that really ought to be a pure and moral matter. In this society, "utility" is measured entirely by what hurts other people. The utility of fixing things is only tolerated so far as it feeds the machine that tortures and selects who lives and who dies. All of our aspirations, everything we'd ever want to do, is given over to these jackals who laugh at you thinking it was ever going to be different. I saw that happen over and over during the 1990s. There is no future after that, and now the world is seeing just how futile it really was to hope for anything. That is very demoralizing. Yet, there is a use for what I write. I saw many other people believe in confused things about why the world was like this, and I didn't want to see that continue… so I began writing in part to highlight exactly what they got wrong and why the thing that did this to them worked on them. Since some of those people read my writing and have told me they found some meaning in it, I feel I've accomplished something. Ultimately my goal is to write for what I consider decent and good, and that some day better people will come around to make my writing obsolete. Right now, that's not happening, because of the insistence of certain people that we have to continue with this failed system of unlimited torture. I do not believe that system will end any time soon, and when it does end, it will not be defeated. It will only transform because it must due to its own obvious failures, and because when this happens, all of us will be destroyed and our faces will be stomped on forever. The next system has nothing to do with us and it won't be anything good, but it will end the present ideology and its values. They will move on, having recreated the world in their image, and every asshole who enabled this will be liquidated. It's all a bunch of faggotry, but that's what humans were consigned to, and that happened a long, long time ago.

Since this very problem of education is at the very core of what I write, I figured I'd say that. If there is any true message of my writing above any other, it is that education in general is always the most regressive and cruel of the institutions humanity can make. It is far worse than the state, which exists to do a job and not for any vaunted ideal, and it is worse than the associations and secret societies that mostly exist to foment a low to moderate grade of torture for their own interests and little more, to protect the holdings of the association and ensure that outsiders are never let in their guild.

>>25439
Education especially in the humanities is a giant hazing ritual so you can finally join the club.

>>25439
No it isn't you fucking moron. The intelligentsia has a specific function and it was critiqued extensively by actually existing instances of socialism throughout history. They were not conceptually opposed to education proper, but neither is the OP's post–you are inferring a conflation where it doesn't actually exist. What is being insinuated is an issue with the system as it presently exists, which is not even an inaccurate take. It is INFNITELY more reactionary to defend the institutions as they currently exist, to reinforce the hegemonic arm of the intelligentsia, and to pretend that academia is somehow objectively neutral.

>>25484
By 'they' I mean people like Lenin, Marx etc.

>>25485
>>25484
Moreover, the entire premise of education (as it currently exists) is one of submission. It isn't an accidental stroke of etymology that you have to 'submit' a paper ;).
To deviate from the accepted standards is an unconscionable act, and deserves to be met only with browbeating in the eyes of the imperious arbitrators.
If you truly think critically, you'll come to the realization that much of academia is a kind of 'ritual' more than it is anything transcendentally objective; most of its presuppositions are arbitrary and cannot be honestly defended, and so they fall back upon the circularity of their own tautological self-validation, either through demanding accreditation (circular) or through deferring to likeminded communities who already predispose themselves to the starting premise that education *must* be an inherent 'good', i.e. curating their argumentative experience with the likes of reddit and bluesky and academic forums and so on (tautological). The basis of contemporary education is to work backwards from a series of starting presuppositions and deem anyone who attempts to dissent anew from this as 'stupid' or 'ignorant' or 'crazy'. So-called 'common sense' is really just a form of brutal conformism, and it is fundamentally feminine in essence–it is best encapsulated with the spirit of the phrase 'Really? I can't even…' or something akin to that. The very notion that the fundamental foundations might be a festering source is treated as an inconceivably profaned thing. I don't share the same cynicism towards the future possibility of the human condition, or the reading of its full nature, as Eugene, but he is absolutely on the mark at least with respect to the current state of affairs.

Name a single philosopher who has produced anything of world shattering, history moving value from the modern universities. There isn't one. Probably the most interesting figures currently out there are those involved in the speculative realist movement, but in the end, irrelevance is the doomed fate of those who radically innovate (i.e. 'challenge') under this system. If you want to be a philosopher, OP, you must do it for the love of an enduring truth which might one day be excavated and embraced hermeneutically, assuming anything even survives that far into the future. You mustn't do it for any present-day adulation, as such a thing is merely going to function as a coopted extent which is at once a reaffirmation of the same unsalvageable system. In order to violate that system meaningfully, it must be destroyed, and the slave-holders are never going to acquiesce quietly into that. The purpose of academia is the real reactionary drivel at present, as its primary function beyond inculcation and subordination is placation, it is to defang and redefine what is deemed 'coherent thought'. Every starry-eyed radical who ended up with tenure is an ivory-towered, class traitor detached from reality–period. Same energy as the entryist democrat candidates who naively think they can revolutionize the system from within. If the board is rigged, the real solution is to flip the table, not to play.

>>25486
BTW OP I have a degree in philosophy. It was a waste of time and money and most importantly sanity. All it did was further entrench my hatred for the capitalist world.
Anyone who currently thinks this shit is worthwhile, at least from a philosophical (and not, say, medical–assuming an honest doctor, of course) perspective, is as delusional and pliable to recuperation as someone like Chomsky. It's hilarious to see so many anarchists embrace university. Worshipping a microcosmic mirror of the dynamic the state already serves, thereby telling on themselves in the implicit process: "We want to abolish our lack of power, not to abolish power altogether–we'll forge it again in our image." Very similar logic to Zionism, wherein the phrase "never again" is perverted into indicating "never again TO THE LIKES OF US", rather than being a universalist renunciation of genocide.

>>25486
>>25487
I was a phil major for years and ended up dropping out and I agree 100% with what you are saying. Academia is just a recuperation factory.

>ideological brainwashing factories
reactionary rhetoric

>>25505
academia is anti-communist, sorry, the theory industry is an industry just like music and movie industries are, and its stimulated by Capital to toe the NATO line in similar ways