Disclaimer: The Ivory Belltower is purely satirical. Don’t take it too seriously.
Avery Mann, first year engineering student, walked onto NC State’s campus for the first time for New Student Orientation. Mann smiled a bit after seeing the famed Hunt Library in its majestic, Modern glory. Mann, with eyes closed, imagined the delight that the future college experience would bring.
Mann had been successful throughout high school, getting a slightly-above-average GPA and SAT score. Mann even padded the old resume by taking a couple of AP courses and participating in a couple of meaningless extra-curricular activities, like National Honors Society and some arbitrary varsity sport. Mann was thrilled to get accepted into a B-tier university: NC State.
After enduring 12 long soul-sucking years in the public education system and being forced to follow a Taylorist model of existence by obeying scheduled bells and teacher-foremen, Mann was ready for something fundamentally new and different. Mann was excited to take ownership of education and enjoy academic freedom for the first time.
Mann channeled these hopes and dreams by signing up to get a four-year engineering degree. Mann could not predict the same long series of repetitive, inane assignments and projects with no pedagogical value that gradually makes otherwise interesting material boring would continue from the old K-12 days.
But Mann knew that deep down that college would be enjoyable, having been convinced by a lifetime of rigorous social conditioning. Every parent, friend, teacher and counselor surrounding Mann had preached that the college experience would be free and pleasurable. Any opinion otherwise would be radically seditious. To survive, Mann would have to internalize the subtle oppression and love all the surrounding un-freedom.
As the Orientation Leader mumbled an uninformed answer to someone else’s stupid, trivial question about MyPack, Mann continued to dream about the future. This time, Mann would get to become the architect of self-actualization.
Through education, Mann could realize dreams, solve global problems and bring prosperity to all. However, what Mann didn’t realize is that the engineering schooling and subsequent labor would only perpetuate continuing systems of capitalist oppression and prop up structural violence.
While eating for the first time at Fountain Dining Hall, Mann was blissfully unaware that all of education policy for the past 60 years has just been one big sorting hat for effectively channeling manpower to the military and other strategic sectors. Mann had yet to learn that the big push behind STEM schooling was to create an artificially difficult curriculum that would filter out the best and brightest. Those who could surmount the decathlon of testing could have the social blessing to perpetuate American neo-imperialism by both making bigger and better weapons and missiles to kill brown people and superior commercial products to cajole brown people into bowing down to consumer capitalism.
Mann sat outside of Talley that evening. The temperature was cool, but the North Carolina humidity still hung in the air. Mann was filled with a wide variety of emotions, but the drive to be a proud, obediently patriotic member of the Wolfpack. Mann continued to naively smile since society had yet to provide Mann with an opportunity to develop a shred of critical faculties. It would be a couple of years until Mann put two and two together to figure out the superficial oppressive elements of the military-industrial-academic complex. But by then, the arrival to critical consciousness would be too late and too insignificant.
