It tries to regulate your information access (what you are allowed to know and not know and when). They like to dictate your body (like where you need to be and when you go to the bathroom). Scoring systems are manipulative and exploitative and actually not constructive to learning. The edu system is more about conditioning kids for capitalism more than anything else.
Academia tries to act as fact bearers and they like to keep a monopoly on stuff like research. They are professional gate keeper credentialists. Some thought policing vibes I get from some people. Seems like all the radical thinkers were sadly cleared out and what’s left is dominated by boot licking liberals and reactionaries.
I’m Californian.
There’s a disturbing facet of Amerikan culture that hides beneath its facade of cleanliness: an utter obsession with urine!
In high school, they collect it from you before you’re allowed to be a part of clubs, ensuring that in your free time you’re not using drugs recreationally. Teachers would literally rather you piss your pants than miss an iota of their spoon-fed propaganda, this has been reported as happening constantly in Amerikan schools. Before you can get a job, they have to harvest your urine to ensure you’re not using drugs. They’ll collect it sporadically henceforth, don’t you worry, just to make sure you’re still clean. And at work? They’d rather you piss in a bottle or piss your pants than take 5 minutes away from useless production to relieve yourself of one of physiology’s most basic struggles! It fuckin’ promotes dehydration at best, and renal failure at worst.
According to everyone and anyone (who doesn’t use it), public transit here reeks like piss. If true, it’s no fucking wonder as it’s apparently the only place poor people can go! They can’t go at school, they can’t go at work, and more and more they can’t go to a store or restaurant and piss without buying something first! “Public restrooms”, I know in some places, are starting to require quarters to enter! What the fuck!
I remember walking around downtown with a fucking bladderful and it took me SEVEN tries to get to use a bathroom. I had like $20 to my name. I only got to go because I snuck in the back at a restaurant and beelined for the bathroom. What the fuck is wrong with this country? Why is it so obsessed with making people fucking hold it?
Sorry for my piss-related rant lol. Your statement about bathroom breaks just got me thinking.
It’s one example people like to cite at how controlling the edu system is. But really it goes a lot deeper than that.
Luckily I get to opt out a lot because I live in an more affluent five acre lot community with my parents. But it sounds like a total piss scape out there.
We can’t make this revolution happen fast enough!
“If I can’t piss, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” – Emma Goldman
Did you know that urinary analysis for job screenings is new as hell? In the U.S. they’ve only been using it since the early 2000s and I don’t think it’s common almost anywhere else, maybe the UK. In Rogue State (2000), William Blum makes reference to UA “trials” in “some parts of New Jersey” as an example of the totalitarian nature of the U.S. As someone younger, it staggered me to learn that.
As far as I can remember I haven’t needed to get urine tested in my life. I have done it for medical reasons but never for a job or school or anything like that. I can’t see why your school or workplace has any business knowing what you do for recreation. Looks like that’s being targeted at poor people specifically.
I haven’t read that yet but it should be on my phone so maybe soon on my backpacking trip.
It may be reflected more in my work experience as someone who has had jobs mostly being around prescription drugs in one form or another, but they don’t test for those as much as they test for cannabis or other illicit ones. I also had some manual labor jobs that didn’t deal with drugs at all that still required UA. It also may be more of a regional thing, being more prominent in the midwest. In Illinois where cannabis is recreationally legal, 70% of jobs still drug test, making it de facto illegal for a majority of proletarians. I also think the further you move up in the corporate ladder, the less and less prevalent they become.