I'm so sick and tired of libs demanding that students juggle scholarship applications, working, studying, and fucking starving in order to get through college.
Y'know what? I don't think students should have to fucking work during school and it is fcked up that we've normalized grinding people into dust in order to achieve an education.
Oh, and fuck you if you have a learning disability and can't do both school and work. Guess it's poverty for you, buddy.
Yeah. I think one of the most depressing parts of my education was a professor (who went to the same university) telling me how different the student experience was 40 years ago. He told stories about storming each other's dorms, off-milk water balloon fights, breaking into the canteen kitchens to cook after nights out, operating all sorts of delicate science equiptment extremely drunk, etc etc etc. The sort of college shenanigans you see in films and assume are made up. Then he asked what the equivalent is for my friends. I had to explain that we studied ourselves into ill health and went into crunch for weeks for the sake of getting top grades, then tried to sleep or distract ourselves with videogames. Maybe go to a bar occasionally. It really illustrated that massive parts of my life aren't normal and shouldn't be normal.
Apparently this anxiety and constant demands of perfection are new. Its a generational thing. Its not normal to have never failed anything and be fucking paralyzingly terrified of ever doing so. He was so upset at how lame and depressing modern kids are, that the spirit of the university is apparently gone, but at least he had the decency to be upset at the culture rather than us. I wonder what it felt like before, if kids were freer?
You get expelled for that stuff now! They actually punish you for it so you cant do any of that stuff anymore even if you had the free time!
You get expelled for less than that - half those would probably be felonies now...
Honestly I feel like a lot of that was just another of the benefits of imperialism we had in the imperial core which have slowly been reclaimed by the bourgeoisie. Less people went to college which mean the standards were lower, which meant they could fuck around more. Fewer educated people also means less competition in the job market. Also of course incomes stopped rising in the '70s but prices kept increasing which meant that they were literally spending less on everything despite making/having the same relative amount of money.