5/13/91
I realize now what a formative moment that battle w/ ETS was for me.
Up until then I had been anally-retentive because I had faith in the system, I believed in the system, not in those around me, I didn’t realize the absurdity of the system.
So when Chad & Vache cheated on the test, I turned them in, because they broke the rules. I also turned them in because they betrayed our trust, and I still think that what they did, that betrayal was wrong. But they understood, or at least Erevan understood that there was something fundamentally absurd
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about the system itself, one which bases a whole year’s work on one single test score. Their amorality was simply a reaction to the amorality of the whole system.
I realized this when ETS turned on us, the believers in the system. Though we believed in them, we were also a threat, because we had unknowingly & innocently revealed the weakness in their system.
If the educational establishment ever found out how easy it was to cheat on those tests, ETS would be doomed, they would lose out. So, they sided w/ the cheaters.
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So, we tried to do the right thing, the thing that we were taught was the moral, “good” decision to turn in the cheaters, our friends.
Our hands were not completely clean, because we found out the topics of the essays on the history tests before we were supposed to, but Chad had also gotten through years of school by cheating, and Erevan by selling his answers.
But they realized something that we had to be shown; that the system itself was (is) immoral & full of shit.
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Only when those we taught to defend crudely turned on us, did we realize how shitty the system is.
I stopped caring about “rules,” I still don’t cheat because I still believe in personal integrity & honesty as a higher value, above any system.
But, I wrote a paper for Omar, because I felt that the instructor was full of shit. She said that it had brilliant insights, but was too creative (original), so she gave him an F. He deserved it, because he had to rely on me to do his work for him. But she is also
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full of shit, because she says that there is only one way to write an essay.
That seems to be the job of “teachers,” to impose a standard on us. There is only one way to spell, there is only one way to read, there is only one way to write an essay.
This system of education is wrong, because it punishes creativity.
That is why my favorite classes in high school were geometry & creative writing, because w/in certain parameters,
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and using certain tools, like theorems & sentences, we were allowed to come up w/ any means to a solution. There was no one way to write a story, or create a proof.
Here in college I often find myself punished for creativity. Not by all instructors, but definitely by those who see their own way as the only way.
What does this have to do w/ ETS?
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Who is to say that sharing answers is even wrong? They just try to instill these “American” values on us, that the individual must be weighed & measured scientifically, stacked & categorized, and the freeloaders done away with.
They try to impose these things from above; a tyranny.
So, was Chad being a freeloader when he cheated off me, stole some of my knowledge. Maybe in the short run, in terms of their system of classification & categorization.
But the fact is that if he relied on me to know things, he
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didn’t know it. If at some point in the future, those things they tried to teach him were really important, he would eventually have to use them & come up empty; he would pay then. But if what they were teaching was meaningless, then this “teaching” is masturbation.
What is the point of testing? The system is a tyranny which does not trust us to learn for learning’s sake. We must prove to them that we know it.
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This is why modern education is a paranoid tyranny which proves & is fueled by immorality. “If they are tested constantly, they will be driven to study by fear of failure. That way we insure that they will learn.”
This attitude just reinforces cheating & grade-grubbing. We were the grade grubbers & they were the cheaters. We decided to “learn” by going for the top scores, while they said “fuck it” & cheated.
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The problem is that the system is based on fear, not love. We both feared failure & grubbing & cheating are both reactions to fear. One is the “honest” reaction, to learn their material as best we could so we could succeed w/in their system.
The cheaters reacted “dishonestly,” but in their own way, more honestly & more courageously than us. They said, fine, if you’re going to make me learn this shit & test me on it, then I’ll do whatever it takes to pass. They realized
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