Status Comes at a Cost to Humanity

Reading the early parts of this book, the author Lonnie encourages others to skip the Rat Race & live aboard a boat.  

Two ways to achieve this are:- to become financially wealthy,  though he cautions that if you don't mix in some of the second path to boat ownership,  you won't be wealthy for long.  The second path to boat ownership is to gain knowledge. 

I expected Lonnie to talk about How to Repair  Boats knowledge.  Instead he's pirating on about all the tertiary institutions he attended, most of them being universities.  And I am beginning to fall out of love with Lonnie already because I went to university,  The University of Newcastle in fact,  & it was singularly the worst experience of my life. I am haunted by the red pen used to "correct" one of my early submissions. The marker was a scrunchy faced academic who apparently did not enjoy the company of "mature aged" students who accessed uni via the lower college system rather than through the schools system.  She tried to make me fell second class & when she circled the words deference and filial, used in proper context, she indicated to me that she was unintelligent & vindictive.  After gaining my qualification & a truckload of psychological bruises, I realised the entire Social Work Department at that university,  except for two very human woman,  were of a similar mind. 

When, in my final year, one lecturer diagnosed "anyone that did not mourn the passing of Princess Diana" as being unable to grieve.  I suggested that it may also be because they could not abode the extreme wealth& privilege that totals lauded offer millions of workers, she went red faced & we all sat for a moment's silence as though straining to hear the crack of a glass window pane three buildings away across campus. Definitely,  my respect for the intelligence of that department & the status of tertiary education took a severe battering that day. 

I note that after years under a conservative government, the word welfare effectively erased from public discourse & college education lays in tatters,  that the Labor government has moved to increase the Minimum Wage & rebuild the community college systems.  

Perhaps like Royal Families, universities have become a wealthy parasite on the ass of humanity.  I did however,  have full respect for the institutions of  knowledge, wisdom & respect for humankind.