women are so privileged for being pressured into wearing make-up since they're little girls while males are truly oppressed for not being taught how to do make-up properly 😪💔
“We are more oppressed than you because we face friction when we try to selectively dabble in things that are forced on you.”
2. What kind of “support and teaching”, exactly, does he think I got during my brief attempts to apply makeup?
3. Regarding ~dysphoria~, EVERY woman feels shitty about her face when she puts on makeup. It’s the entire premise of how the industry works. So I’m sure as fuck not going to give a cookie and a hug to the male fetish havers who also get a taste of that.
How was this specific entitled poster related to self-recognized gay men at all. (Not the ones who call themselves women)
All demographics of men pretend they are more opressed because of gender roles, like men who opt to work in areas women are the majority, even if we know they are not actually opressed there. But homophobia does actually get them killed and ostracized. Very out of place comment imo.
Its literally made by a straight male in the same fetishizing form that female bisexuality is always depicted by them but sure, the biphobia is cropping an image to be of only 2 women kissing instead by someone with no ill intent, just to match the theme of their blog. Because we are always missing m/f love in art. 🙄 It would truly be less dishonest to call it disrespectful to the artist than to call it biphobia
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I have so much love and respect for women who are honest about their own loneliness but also find the good in it like when audrey hepburn said “I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel” and when charlotte bronte said “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself” and when jenny slate said “I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am. But that’s why I want to do comedy, and why I want to connect with people. You can use that ribbon to be a part of a finer tapestry, or you can choke yourself out with it! Your choice!” and when mary oliver said “whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things”
Feminist who want to make world matriarchal, mother- and child-centric want to drag non-breeder women down to poverty. They fantasize about offices with childcare, making childless women work in kindergartens, getting social benefits for breeding, wife salary and such and such. Great plan to make women more undesirable for employment with decent salary. Just like moids want it to be.
Companies dont want to hire women when they potentially can sit at home on paid maternity leave for 3 years and take paid sick leave every time their kid have slight cold while someone else works instead of them. So every woman will be potential shirking lazy incubator from employer's point of view. Thank you hoes.
Non breeder have to pay with their time, career opportunities and life quality in "matriarchal femenists" fantasies. It's no different from patriarchal woman demanding and leeching time and resources from childless women and girls because "they have nothing to do and worry about"
I don't know if it was a typo or deliberate, but feMENists really is what they are; everything is really to please men, while they merely cosplay as women who care about the safety and freedom of girls and women.
It was deliberate, but i didn't notice how accurate by meaning it is. Really, they are 'feMENists'
Yes, they are very busy reposting statistics over and over and desperately arguing with some moids for tiny portion of respect and recognition as human, while keeping close these contributors in statistics. Repeating all the same things to men that tell them to fuck off. All bark and no bite, men know that perfectly and do what they want. No wonder women always seen as less by them.
Femenists scream about equality, choice(=keeping status quo most of the time) but still act like nannies for grown moids hoping to find the perfect one (he pretends to care about her 'future is female' type ramblings, said something good about women once and doesn't insult her in her face, only behind her back lmao). Scratch a femenist, even 'radical' - tell her she doesn't have to find a man and play house with him, and you find an ordinary t(rad)hoe underneath
Lmao neoliberal doom blabber is never and will never be useful for the liberation of women. Most women already live in poverty outside your socioeconomic bubble, and the only way to change that is through a class revolution that does indeed treat reproductive labour fairly, and part of that is parental aid. Wanting mothers to be excluded from the workplace is misogyny, plain and simple.
being from the global south is waking up to your country being fucked over by american imperialist scum and then going online and seeing them act like the helpless eternal victims about it lol
how many times have you heard i want to kiss girls but it's scary. you have said those words, even. you flinch but you still do feel it - kissing men is easier, dating men is easier. there is already a social contract about it. a republican's wet dream; you had been socially conditioned to "know" what to do, even if it has never explicitly been described to you. the man and the woman get together, end of story.
you want women, of course. you want them, badly. and sometimes you wonder about that. is it because a man isn't real to you? this thing you have with men - is it only easier because you wouldn't have to change anything? your parents can pretend you're "straight", no matter how many times you exit the closet or say i'm at least half gay.
are you just... afraid?
because what if it's not true. what if kissing girls is just as easy - better, even - than kissing boys. what if dating girls means there's no weird subtle power imbalance; means that your life is full of laughter and love.
or maybe it's because if men don't find you attractive - well, okay, whatever. they can choke. you don't exist to make men happy, certainly. you can shave your head and let your leg hair grow out and dye your eyebrows because fuck what men think.
but what do women want? what if you try as hard as you can and you are not what women want? or worse - what if they do want you, but you have no idea how to treat them? certainly dating a woman is not dating a man; and you only have the manual (ha!) for one kind of relationship. everyone at this queer bar probably has kissed and hooked up and knows interesting positions to fold other women into. they've probably had sex in the bathroom and know where to slide their fingers into.
logically you know every body is different. there is no singularly correct way to have sex or kiss or love anyone of any gender. you know some people need to suck toes or do gymnastics or picture wife-roaches. so how hard could it be, really.
but you tell yourself - well, the dating pool is smaller. you have heard so many wlw horror stories from your friends - like their exes randomly appearing at a party, or the time three of your friends all accidentally dated the same person at once. and your lesbian friend warns you - wlw breakups hit harder.
and it's not like you're unhappy. you are happy, certainly. the man you're with now might genuinely be the love of your life. he paints his nails and likes bugs and treats you like a princess.
but still. in the late night, you feel your heart stutter. because what if it isn't really that difficult. what if you're just creating false assumptions in your head in order to fit a fear-based narrative. what if this is your internalized homophobia; what if it's heteronormativity; what if you're the only thing stopping you. what if those rules don't exist, and you're imagining scenarios so that you never take a risk.
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
the men in my life are all good men, or, at least, they are men who are not violent - and that is enough for a man to be considered good; that he could be violent but is not.
the men in my life are good men. recently at a hardware store one of the men in my life let me stand behind him, just a little, in that ghosting way that girls can learn. the disappearing technique we master of shadowing behind our Good Men. this was to protect me from a man who was not-being-good.
i fall down. one of the good men in my life offers me one arm like a knight, we are laughing while i clamber back onto my feet. i give the good men in my life piggy back rides because i like to show off how strong i am. i give the good men in my life run-at-them hugs. i let the good men in my life pick me up like i am a sack of grain; i get the good men in my life coffee, i make them sandwiches, i teach them dancing.
i am a man-hater, obviously. i am gay enough the insult is sort of funny. waiting for the bus, where there are men who are not-known-to-be-good, i google how to make a fist. i can never remember if the thumb goes on the outside or the inside, only that it is imperative that i do not fuck it up or i will break my thumb at the same time the man tries to break me.
i walk my dog around the track only-at-dusk and-no-later. i made that mistake once, in august, hoping i could take a later run and maybe see the stars - i romanticized the idea of being able to skulk like a fox. the man that followed me across three lawns, two road-crossings, and back to my car - he spent the whole time whistling. the good men in my life say - oh, do you need me to come with you? and are actually asking - do you feel safe?
i fall down in a supermarket. a man i do not know grabs the inside of my knee. i do not know if the man is good, but i am supposed to give men the benefit of the doubt, so i laugh while standing. a man trying-to-be-in-my-life says what, no hug? and i have to decide if it worth it to just take off or put up with it. a man who-might-not-be-good stares at me while i walk by - i have to calculate if he’s just looking or if he’s watching. other men have badly hurt me, physically. the casual remark made is that those men are not real men. but they were real enough, to me.
there are many men who are mad at me. an entire reddit thread once was dedicated to how to dox me for feminist ranting - it was kind of funny, when it wasn’t downright scary. i have been stalked and harassed and treated horribly. they are all good men, in their own lives, you know. they are not violent, usually, unless provoked, and all it takes for a man to be good is for him to not be violent unless provoked, and i am, of course, always provoking.
a man in my life rolls his eyes. “i am sick of hearing this. we get it, all men are fucking evil. get over it.”
a man who-is-not-good shouts something unwritable at me. i have to tell the good man i am standing next to - it’s okay, this is nothing compared to what-could-be, this happens, it’s really not that big of a deal to me.
well, I'll tell you what, I'll do my best not to pick fights about A Little Life, but it did make me laugh out loud to see Hanya Yanagihara taken to task for advocating for suicide by someone with "yankees kill yourselves" in their bio
not to be a little thorn in the side of the true anti-imperialist comrades of tumblr but do you think "yankees" in contexts like these includes Tejano people and Native people and Black people of African ancestry? 🤔
Depends. Only if they act as imperialist pests because no demographic can exempt you from that by virtue of identity. But trying to pin it as racism (in part against people of my own demographic outside of geopolitical boundries but who benefit from being imperial core citizens) is funny and dishonest.
It would do you well to remember nobody here was claiming the author advocates for anything, what was being discussed were an authors point of view of the treatment the "clinically depressed" and the point or lack thereof in such. Believing something and that being reflected in your work is hardly advocating for it. And saying "yankees kys" or "death to america" online in a website that consists mostly of neoliberal yanks will unfortunately do nobody any harm, little miss language police. Hardly prone to cause more harm than a bestseller book or the discussion it prompts, which is still not enough reason not to write it, read it or discuss, and so there are less reasons not to express hostility against the imperialist status quo in jest in case it might affect the mental stability of a random gringo (who might be racialized).
I didn't think your original reblog was in bad faith until this and therefore was worth disagreeing with but yankees will be yankees for sure
I’m going to say something that might sound crazy. Suicide and suicide attempts are sort of a societal alarm bell that says “something is very wrong with the environment this individual was in.” A living being choosing to take themselves out of existence is the most extreme act of distress there is. The state stepping in to silence this alarm bell by funneling suicidal people into a state sanctioned euthanasia program, normalizing this act through a socially accepted bureaucratic system, is not a good thing. It goes hand in hand with the state’s interest in maintaining the status quo at the expense of the population and the psychiatric industry’s interest in individualizing societal problems to extract profit and aid the existing system. It’s saying “there are no complaints here, just people with sick brains, carry on.”
There's something deeply disturbing to me about any individual thinking (not about themselves but about another person, or people in general) "death is the best and only solution" (unless terminally ill and in excruciating pain). But seeing it elevated to policy is absolutely terrifying.
That's why I was so disturbed by the booktok-darling novel A Little Life, whose entire premice is to offer a demonstration that yes, sometimes, suicide is the answer. To be clear, this isn't a conspiracy theory but the author's stated goal, which she has reiterated in multiple interviews. It is perfectly competently and even compellingly written, which only makes it more dangerous.
I don't know how we've reached a place where people think it makes sense to turn around, look at the people coming after you and go "Actually, it doesn't get better. You should just die."
Life is messy and complicated and at times excruciating. It's also absolutely worth sticking around for. Because it can be vibrant and comforting and exciting and exquisite. It's hard to keep sight of that in the hard times, but that's the point: hope is precious and hard to come by and hold onto. Don't let go of it if you can help it. Don't listen to peddlers of despair. And don't become one.
1) I am extremely disturbed by much of the Dekker story. I am not addressing Iris Dekker, her chronic illness, or my personal beliefs about biopolitical capital and a medical-industrial complex that would rather approve euthanasia than finance research into complex pain disorders.
2) Hanya Yanagihara has said that she was interested, artistically, in “creat[ing] a character who never gets better” and in exploring the limits of normative talk therapy for a character who has suffered as Jude has; she says that suicide is “devastating and often perplexing,” and that its meaning is relative and culturally determined; she does not advocate for suicide but recognizes the obvious truth that some people are suicidal and unable, in their contexts and with the tools at their disposal, to stop being suicidal.
this is a necessary thing to recognize so that we can change what is not working.
misrepresenting Yanagihara and her work without actually quoting her or providing evidence for your claims about her, while repeatedly using quite damaging language that directly mimics suicidal ideation, is not responsible suicide prevention work.
Her works are interesting, well written and compelling; however it does become obvious after a while that the authors justified disbelief in psychiatry is informed by her own belief that a worthy life is inherently impossible for some after they've been traumatized, not really by the fields shortcomings in acknowledging, investigating and treating symptoms as being responses to the environment. She quite literally advocates in a hopeful manner for the possibility of a professional sanction of euthanasia for psychiatric patients in this interview. (Along with some chauvinistic beliefs about women's interiority and societal privileges that lack self awareness for someone so capable.)
None of this means her works should not be read or discussed, in contrary her points of view should inspire discussion BECAUSE some of us find it dishonest and disagreeable or her novel becomes pointless unless used as propaganda of said views. Her work was never intended to be "suicidal prevention" work either so I'm not sure why you would bring that up.
The author of "A Little Life" on a stubborn lack of redemption
USA college conversation of two 22 year old students: Tyler cheated on me with Mackenzie from premed, this is going to ruin my chances of getting a good grade in my math exam to go to law school
Normal conversation between a 45 yo, a 20 yo and 18 yo college students in latam: Jesse they refused to raise the budget we need to go bomb the parliament tomorrow
Upper-middle-class Americans conceptualize and largely experience college as "13th-16th grade for 18-22 year old children," as well as a kind of secular rumspringa where 20 year olds have a bit of social license to dabble in things like sex, drugs, progressive politics, and queerness, as long as they put it aside when they "grow up." And because upper-middle-class Americans have a stranglehold on media, this is represented as the platonic ideal of what college is.
Regular working-class American college students are age-diverse (most are over 25), usually have jobs, often have children and/or spouses and/or other family responsibilities, and are there to pursue a specialized career.
Be careful saying this, though, because criticizing the upper-middle-class framework of college will get 900 people on this website calling you an anti-intellectual who hates the very concept of learning.
Neither demographic is organized or committed enough to do a direct action, though, that much is true. That's more a nationwide cultural flaw than anything college-specific.
American colleges becoming more accessible was at one point a big disruptive factor in our politics. SDS and the anti-war movement, the Weather Underground -- whole slews of groups organized around protest and militant direct action came out of that period, so whether we're measuring by efficacy or simple willingness to break the law, there was a time when the demographic of working class college students had some the chutzpah you're talking about. How we got from there to here is a long story that I don't know all of, but the need to react to dissidents coming out of colleges shaped the modern FAFSA system, the prison system, labor markets -- major structural changes occurred in the 70s, 80s and 90s that were all at least partly informed by a perceived need to gatekeep college education so it would continue to be a class marker instead of the tool for organizing that it very quickly became when it was briefly more egalitarian.
americans are so fucking stupid they will reply to a south american talking about university with this. like latin american regimes under western imperialist interventionism haven't violently repressed a thousand student movements through massacres. but um don't even lightheartedly critizise impcore media because you're being classist and you don't understand how bad the us gov is to amerikkkans :(
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
