The Metaphysical Files

But I bet you live in denial.  I wanted to talk about so much today, but now that I'm here and typing, I'm just drawing blanks.  That's okay though, we'll just plod along as usual.  What I'm concerned about in this day and age is education.  There's so much emphasis on the wrong things, and the actual way we learn and assess things is completely wrong.  The tests for intelligence are completely arbitrary and culturally imperialistic.  But picture this, we study for things that we have covered over that learning period, but then come exam time, we are usually tested on something we've never covered before.  If we haven't had time to evaluate how other principles can be related or tested in other settings, then of course nobody is going to do well.  And then come the inevitable bad marks, and people lose motivation for studying.  So many people drop out of school in High School and College, and it's terrible.  The will to learn, the drive and innovation and creativity and inherent curiosity of their nature has been beaten out of them through attrition and bad teaching.  Learning is mocked, treated as the 'nerd's game' while others chase frivolous pursuits.  I think society would be better served if we changed how we view education, and how children are taught.  Learning should be for learning's sake, not for assessment and rankings.  Then comes the other end of the spectrum, where schools progress people without proper teaching.  There's so many adults out there who lack basic literacy and numeracy skills.  How could this not have been picked up or addressed when they were still in primary school?  The system has failed them.  Let's not talk about the bridge between private and public education, but there's something wrong.  Class sizes are too big, teachers are underpaid (and they're usually not entirely skilled).  And disruptive students rule the roost.  This is probably different in the US, where I imagine the drunken jockocracy rules the roost.

If it's a lie, then I'll believe the lie, but at least I'll feel better.  I wanna get metaphysical, metaphysical, I wanna get!  Well I did, until I totally forgot what my point was going to be.  Things seem to alternate between guitar, politics, and education on this blog.  Well they're pretty major themes in my life, aren't they?  Well that and whole load of other crap.  Am I stronger now than I ever have been?  There's no way of knowing that.  In fact, there's a whole lot of things I don't know.  The clock is winding down and I wonder if it's all just a bunch of idle loose change, just stuck in a maze.  And there's no way out. 

Is there a greater purpose?  Who are all these people?  Sometimes my life just feels like less interesting version of the Truman Show.  None of this can be real, it feels like a big hoax, but I sort of know it is?  How can that be right?  You can explain what something is, very easily, but you can hardly explain what something means. 

It would be better to not be connected to anything, because you must let everything go at some point. 

There is an easy middle ground in Australian politics.  The Conservative party here is just whacko, and they are the absolute worst of 1950's conservative tropes.  Women as housewives, poor as useless slaves, and minorities/ethnic people as enemies to be feared.  The issue with the current 2 party system is that the liberal party (which is comically known has the Labor party) is so aligned with the Trade and Worker Unions, that it cannot be objective in workplace issues.  All of the big wigs from that party are all former Union heavyweights, and when they retire, they handpick others from past jobs to take their place.  This leads to a very 'friend for friend' attitude, and of course the best person for the task never gets the role.  So when their reputation is preceded by their work in the unions, how can they effectively govern?  Besides Criminal Law, the next cornerstone of a society in an industrialised world is Employment and Workplace Law.  It governs how all workers operate in light of their employment.  Employees already have the upper hand, because they're the ones paying the cheques, overworking employees and in other cases, underpaying them.  But sometimes unions go too far in terms of what they want, so who will protect the employer and provide a common sense approach?  Certainly not the Labor government.  And certainly not the Coalition, who seek to protect the employers at all expenses of the worker.

Ahh here's the metaphysical!  It struck me while I was out at lunch.  Is there an inherent balance to life?  Just say you had the power to bring the dead to life, would something else need to die in order to maintain that balance?  We operate in such a narrow field of view, we can only see such a slim shade of reality (that is our own), and there's still so much out there which we're not aware of.  If you could reverse time, would it need to be fast forwarded somewhere else, considering it's a circular concept?  But all of this is predicated on there being balance.  What if there is none, and this is all just a random collection of events and memories that are all just doomed to be lost in the ether?  How terrifying. 

In all cultural portrayals of Death as a humanoid figure, it's almost always evil.  Why is that?  Death is a natural part of life.  It belongs with life.  Life cannot exist without death.  Are the answers in my memories?  Where is home?  Some weird things are going to happen, I suspect.


Joaquin out.