Learned Helplessness and the School System

We recently watched Lethal Weapon (1987). That movie, like many of the TV shows and movies of that era, features saxophone in its theme music. The sax was relatively common in the pop music of that time as well. I ended up playing sax from middle school all the way through college. I only played in college because I had a scholarship. I was pretty much done with it by the end of high school.

The music program in my high school was really good, but I knew I didn't even want to be a professional musician, or even an amateur hobby musician, so it was kind of a waste of my time even though I was relatively good at it. When we were watching Lethal Weapon I had flashbacks to the "Solo and Ensemble" contest that were held every year.

Every year, musicians from local schools would travel to one of the schools in Northeast Ohio and play a solo or an ensemble piece. I did it every year I was in high school. It's not a contest in the sense that one person per category can "win", you just get a grade and maybe a ribbon or medal, I don't really remember the details clearly. I know, though that the best grade is a "1", and maybe the worst is a "4".

Anyway, I was thinking about how that experience was similar to much of the other school related things I did. The students jump through fairly arbitrary hoops and are "judged" by fairly arbitrary groups of adults. It's a great example of "gamified reality" in fact it's training to live in the game-ified reality world. It has nothing to do with real life. I began to understand the difference sometime during the senior year of high school. I went and took scholarship tests, auditions, interviews at various colleges that year... I was mostly done with the phony formalism by then. The absurdity of it all was really starting to sink in.

If you want to be a professional musician, you go out and play and try to get jobs. If you want to be an amateur musician that plays for fun, you just play. Maybe you put it on YouTube if you want an audience. There's nobody "judging" that you got all the notes right and giving you a meaningless grade. Many musicians that made millions of dollars performing really kind of suck from the solo/ensemble contest perspective, or maybe had no formal music training.

The reality of being a musician is the same as being an engineer, or a scientist, or really anything. The idea you need "credentials" is just part of the gamified reality world. Some of the real world training you'd need to be capable in surgery, dentistry, or whatever, would be difficult to obtain outside the institutions that are part of the system currently, but it's not fundamentally different than learning to be a master craftsman at carpentry or metal working or whatever.

The gamified world is 100% arbitrary and not real at all. The vast majority, I'll say almost all the formal training I received from pre-school through college had nothing to do with real life. That sort of training applies to almost every "civilized" person. You're trained to play the game that's run by psychopaths and inbred ruling class weirdos. People have been living that way for thousands of years.

It's noteworthy that the game world imposes on "real life" as much as possible and winnows it down to a minimal percentage of people's time and experience for adults and kids alike. If you were raised in "the real world" solving real world problems instead of being raised "in the game", the game world would be an incomprehensible waste of time and energy. The game participants would be seen as bumbling dopes and utter fools.