The dude’s speech
by Giuliano A. Montecarlo
Mr de Wilde already pointed out the idea that people are afraid of dreaming. More precisely, it’s that people can’t afford to dream.
The modern society is build on the fact that everything can be turned into money. You spend most of your time planing tomatoes in your garden? Rent an acre, plant and sell your tomatoes and you’re all set up. However, this works only for professions that create material matters. For example, let’s assume that somebody is enthusiastic about politics, and thus wants to become a politician. This is a performance of thought, that doesn’t bring immediately material nor monetary benefit to the enthusiast. Even in countries that incorporate a safety net in form of “unemployment benefits”, the enthusiast is not able to perform his studies full time. In European countries, people are forced to settle for profane and less profitable professions, against their will, and surrender to the tyranny of the capital and it’s continuous, governmental approved and supported hunger for cheap workers.
What ever the ideas of the enthusiast were, we will never know. They might pop up out of the blue by a proper politician, who had the money to attend a university, decades later, bringing heavenly blesses and wealth for himself and his descendants for generations to come.
You might ask, “Why doesn’t he just attend a university, so he can live his dream?”. Naturally, that would be the logical solution to this problem. But there are at least two unreasonable restrictions. First, of course, the tyranny of the capital. In Europe, this is a secondary issue, however somewhat present. There aren’t tens of thousands of dollars of fees just to attend one semester of university, but still he has to provide food and shelter to himself. Second, he has to be eligible. This means in most countries that he has to have a high school degree or equivalent. The single fact that he has a broad knowledge in politics and skills like rhetoric and dialectic that might even exceed a high school degree does not count at all, because there is no enrollment test, which would make him eligible regardless of the fact whether he graduated from school at all or not. Driving him into endless and exhausting years of night school to obtain a in this context rather symbolic high school degree while working to provide himself is a great liability, and his will to endure this intellectual and capitalistic torture should make him eligible in the first place - in particular as he has fundamental knowledge of the field of study anyways.
For me, this is a selective harassment on the lower class of society, whether intended or not, whether reluctantly tolerated or deliberately approved by the responsible authority.
In conclusion is to say that as a community of human beings, like Plato has intended more than two thousand years ago already, we should watch our children carefully and give them the suitable education needed to drive them to their full potential, even if this doesn’t comply with generalized school legislations, synchronized curricula or the budget that can be brought up by the pupils, but with the individual needs of the pupils so they can live up to their full potential, serving the community and additionally, making the world a better and more advanced place for the man and woman of the future.
Kind regards
G. A. Montecarlo