In order to stay alive, you need to earn money. Unless you’re a trust fund baby, this means you need a job. In order to get a job, you need academic credentials. At the very least you need a G.E.D. or a high school diploma. Anyone over the age of 18 who doesn’t have a high school diploma will find it almost impossible to get any job other than entry-level customer service work or hard manual labor. Most of these jobs pay minimum wage with little hope for advancement, health care, or retirement plans.
If you don’t have the credentials to get a higher paying job, your dreams will never come true no matter how hard you work. You can pull yourself out of a life of poverty and thankless work by being really, really clever, but if you’re not academically inclined enough to get a high school degree, you’re probably not clever enough to start your own business or teach yourself a rare job skill.
This means if you’re not academically inclined enough to pass high school, then you’re basically doomed to waste the rest of your life working as hard and long as possible for little money as possible. You’ll never have enough money to buy a brand new car, a house, or go on lavish vacations. Some people would say, “That’s what you get for screwing up.” To that, I would reply, “You’re a heartless monster.” Failing high school doesn’t mean you deserve to suffer for one minute, let alone the rest of your life.
Even if you’re academically inclined enough to get a high school diploma, but you’re not smart enough to get a degree from an accredited university, you’re still stuck in basically the same position. You’ll pretty much be limited to entry-level work unless you can get some kind of trade certification.
When you’re faced with the prospect working as a disposable wage slave for decades, the cost/benefit analysis of turning to a life of crime starts to add up. Why suffer endlessly and fruitlessly, when you can risk it all for quick money? Not all criminals are noble savages, but a lot of them are simply academically disinclined individuals choosing the most logical path to prosperity society gave them. Our education/credentialization system is as much to blame for their crimes as them.
The punishment for failing at school is a life of destitution, servitude, malnutrition, exhaustion, and hopelessness. This is not the way an enlightened society behaves, and the more we punish the academically disinclined, the worse we make society. From a cosmic perspective, we’re also wasting the potential of infinitely valuable life forms who took 14.7 billion years to create. Furthermore, our failure to treat our fellow human beings decently puts a black stain on all of our accomplishments. As long as the oppression of the academically disinclined continues we all deserve a hard kick in the groin, especially our politicians and education administrators.
If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:
The Importance of Public Education
- Education is the silver bullet to the world’s problems
- The value of knowledge
- Every grain of knowledge is valuable. Every grain of ignorance is destructive
- We’ve never raised an entire generation of adults ever
- They’re giving away free superpowers on the internet
- The Alphabits analogy (Why it’s bad to be stupid)
- It’s not cool to be stupid
- Why you should have high intellectual standards
- Recommended intelligent books and videos
- We have never raised an entire generation of adults, ever
- The rising tide of vagrant intellectuals
Flaws in the Public Education System
- 6 ways universities make people dumber
- The glass ceiling of higher education
- We need to do more to help people get the job they’re suited for
- A modest proposal on the moral imperative of teacher accountability
- The quality of our leaders reflects the quality of our higher education system
Improving Public Education
- The entry I submitted to Google’s 10×100 contest
- 1 way to improve college education
- School and work should be fun, and they can be
The Wise Sloth 
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