Aselin

I know it has been hard for everyone to miss, with all the fanfare and pageantry, but today I graduate from college.

This journey has been a long, convoluted road that started out with a plan, turned into a principle and ended up with me banging my head against a table.

Education in America has completely changed since I started my formal university education waaaay back in 1987. Heck, education in its current format would be completely unrecognizable to most of our founding fathers. Periodically I receive e-mail exams from the 1800's or early 1900's that no average American could pass today. Things that were considered basic skills not too long ago.

I think where we went wrong is offering "free" education to everyone. Education doesn't matter to most students anymore. Sit in any high school classroom and you will find a good half of them bored, unmotivated and uninterested. Lots of students can't meet basic standards and demonstrate basic skills. A high school diploma doesn't mean much in the real world anymore.

Because of that we all started going off to college. In my household it was assumed the kids (my sister and me) would go to college. So we did. I LOVED it, the whole college experience was created just for me. I had amazing instructors I can still remember even all these years later, and exhilarating moments of learning that can only be described as spiritual experiences. It was then I developed a cursory understanding and passion for quantum physics; I finally understood calculus; I learned basic writing skills I should have learned in high school and I got a bad grade in Public Speaking.

Then my plan was derailed and I had to drop out.

Fast forward a bunch of years and I return as an adult to the newfangled Online Education.

A vehicle where outdated material and inaccessible instructors ask students to regurgitate facts and ideas for a high price. No skills were honed, I was chastised more than once for trying to sound smart, and some of my political ideas - while requested by the assignment - did not mesh with the instructors and earned low marks. I suffered math classes with incorrect formulas, history classes with incorrect texts in the syllabus, instructors grading assignments against the wrong answer keys and a myriad of unacceptable and dare I say, unethical happenings.

I have pondered a couple of things in preparation for today.

Was it all worth it? Quite frankly, I don't know. What I received was not an enriching education. As of today I do have a piece of paper that may make it easier to get a job. So that is good and likely worth it.

What did I learn? I learned that we love to create bureaucracy. It doesn't matter where, but humans seem to make bureaucracy wherever they congregate. It defies logic, common sense and all of our preferences, but that doesn't seem to stop us. Over and over I heard, "you are right, but I can't do anything about it."

It doesn't seem to matter what we do, we set up organizations and then have people interface with the customer who have NO authority to do anything. The very last class I took was an economics class. For my final exam the school had a policy that all the assignments had to be graded before you could take the final. This was the course where they had been grading my assignments against the wrong answer key, so once I got that corrected, I was done with their arbitrary timeline.

Standing in the testing center requesting my final exam to a young student employee, we went the bureaucratic rounds. She finally, and I don't feel one bit bad about this, burst into tears and said she could get fired for requesting my final before the assignments were graded. I climbed up partway on the desk and with steam coming from my ears bullied my way through the stupid bureaucracy, took the exam, marched into the parking lot and burst into my own tears.

Sadly, even though this was the end of my University education, this will not be the end of my interface with stupidity. Every form of government, customer service, kid's schools - doesn't matter, someone has implemented rules the person talking to you can't get around. Rules to "protect you" that somehow have turned us all into people who completely understand the woman in front of us in line beating the clerk with her purse.

Hopefully I will get a few blog posts out of those beatings.