Why Did I Drop Out Of College In The Final Semester?

By Meinrad Socien

Why did I drop out of college in the final semester?
I grew up in a poor village where a degree certificate means everything but I had to cease to attend lectures two months before my last final exams. The formal education had taught me that the salary highway is alone and there is no other. Avoiding not the knowledge but the greatest certificate I could manage to get was a bold action and a bold statement in a world addicted to statements made boldly.

In this work, I accuse the university as an institution, the world over for only teaching but not answering questions. I argue that learning is all about two things: (1) being taught or teaching yourself, (2) being answered, or being given a question to answer, or being answered before you even know that something is a question.
 

This work doesn't attack formal learning. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meinrad Socien
• Release date: Jun 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201128678

Book preview

Preface and disclaimer

A January 1985 National Geographic Magazine had been occupying some space on my table when I settled to write this work on 05 May 2021, a work which I intended to put a final full stop to on 05 June 2021. An advertisement was on its first page, it was from Sabena, a Belgian airline that closed its wings in 2001 following 9/11. Business Class has a different meaning when it’s introduced by an airline that realises that businessmen are human beings first, Sabena Business Class proves that air travel can still be a pleasure, make sure you’re booked aboard, the lines in the ad said. The picture accompanying included a man sitting next to his obeying wife being attended by an air hostess, saluted as a businessman and a better customer. When the Airline’s marketing department decided to do their work, women were, as it seems, not considered to be in the business class, but just accessories then part of the pleasures available to men. Here an ad, not a formal institution, was emphasising an already existing conception, saying indirectly saying that the business people, who are men and not women, don’t have time for much pleasure. If much pleasure doesn't catch up with them, the pleasure is left behind.

In bold, somewhere on the page, it was written savoire-faire. It was a social skill the company had in giving the business-men the pleasure best to them.

It requires rare eyes to see such things because they’re allegories. The emphasis on what’s normally agreed to be ideal is always followed by some bragging of some sort, and my university in some ads greeted me with text like, research shows that students graduating with us in the past decades are better salaried than from other universities. My specific nation is poor, it’s not salaries but players in the business field the nation needs the most. The university is teaching its material into the salary tracks, hoping that foreign investment can result into such salaries. Yours may not be poor, but inequality is likely to exist there.

While I am blaming the formal education system for failing to give the teaching appropriate to its task, one of ending poverty or inequality, just as Sabena failed in fighting stereotypes on women, I take a look at the society where the emphasis on the education system’s traditional failures is done. Where such failures are blindly seen as not failures but all part of what’s their good work. My intention is not to offend but if there is any offence, I am sorry and I can’t help it.

When I need an expert in any format of solid knowledge, my shouts are to go straight to the academic circle. They are big people and they must be. The circle has a task to get the knowledge it has or it gives applied. It must find the other formats of knowledge that include the knowledge of applying knowledge if any inequality or poverty is to be solved.

My intention is not to make a fuss over those who demonstrated against massive retrenchments and a sharp rise in living standards in 1996. My narration is not an apologia but it can utilise wrongly facts for the sake of justifying my decision, defaulting college. My love for humanity is immense, it goes deep like a mid-oceanic trench, and so is my love for my parents.

I don’t detest my national anthem. It’s my source of pride and I expect it to be so.

This is the first of my work in the College Dropout series. Enjoy. My Life And The Business I Minded after Dropping College comes second, and I will allow it to attack me with words just as I am attacking the education system in this one.

This is not a scholarly work. It is best to consider it as an array of the authors opinions. I, the author, therefore, will not be held answerable or responsible for a harm, if any, caused to the readers through this work.

You are rich, I was taught. But I am very poor.

Apresident for a great nation like the United States, right? When in front of the people at a press address. Habitual is him throwing phrases like our democratic values'' or our rich history of inclusion", which is not bad because he too, like many of us believe that he must say that about America because that’s the second biggest democracy in the world or the most powerful, and the future of the said democracy. But if you are his (I can not put or her here after his, which is not an insult but, you know a tragedy) daughter you can have the privilege to ask some of the questions that will baffle him like, dad, during which year did America became an independent republic, and when was she referred first to by any of such people like you as a democracy, and was she really from that moment a democracy for all in it? Why, and if she was a democracy for the few, how many?

We do have a perforated garment and everyone in our countries thinks it is not, he or she believes it will make a nice suit for us to be in, a suit tailored right now and be one right now. Everyone, including the president, is taught to take a perforated garment as a nice one. That teaching and the garment itself, now, as per my view must not be rubbed off entirely. All the people should be made aware that the garment is perforated so that they can find a nice one for themselves. The garment itself is not bad (what’s bad is being perforated), democracy is never, we must be taught about it, be masters in it, and be all in and be accepted as all of us who deserve it. Beginning by accepting that we don’t have it, or we have the weakest dilution of it operating in our nation’s structures is superb a starting point.

In my country, they even rubbed capitalism off arguing that they were adopting scientific socialism. Capitalism, however, existed as the whole economic food chain, and the nation’s government became a captive. Later, I was taught by adults who were already deeply taught not to voice about the garment but to go under, and I grew up in their teaching. My teachers were both in my formal and my informal learning points like home, school and religious structures, believing already that we are better off and had to force their belief into me. The cycle is all about a teaching of bounty and adequateness to the offspring by the one ahead in the walk of life, by the expert down to the amateur, and when the offspring or amateur matures into being one ahead or an expert s/he must do what was done to him by those ahead.

This is a stuck cycle. It only flips to decades ahead and not to anything much.

I could not see that it is capitalism I am forever going under instead of being the one benefiting in it. Education, which is at the centre of what I was immersed in, must protect capitalism but where it is wrong is to blindfold us so that real capitalism remains a real benefit to the few. So, I was not only taught to reason indirectly wealth was, excluding me, for the few, but to see myself as better-off. And cherish being myself under the garment, not up there with a voice over it and to be a beneficiary of it.

Before they taught me I was naturally a bad kid. It was hard to break me. They used a whip to get my gallop steady but it wasn’t much to keep me under. Later, I reversed the bad part of their teaching, only to reteach myself proper.

I never settled and or allow the other debris to be above me. Each time when the wind blew, I was the first to be the dust, not to varnish but to be carried a little away, knowing that I can never return to where I was but not even feeling the pain of being rejected a thousand times because pain hurts. That way, my life would be a perfectly balanced stage with shocks and the bad scenes like my dropping out of a place regarded as super