THE STANDARDIZED BOX

Here’s another overlooked weapon of enslavement: the #2 pencil. I sweep them up all the time around here – nubbed, chewed, snapped, grounded down to a dull finish. And when I look at these little leaded spears… well, they strike me as an ironic metaphor for what’s been happening to you and your so-called education since you stopped wearing diapers.

After some semi-restrained fun in Kindergarten, what happens? You’re put in a box labeled “Elementary School,” force-fed a limited menu of knowledge, then handed a #2 pencil and a standardized test. Of course you’re clueless to the fact that your score (combined with the scores of the other 35-to-40 kids in the class) has a direct effect on your Teacher’s job security – a Teacher who, from the get-go, has been handcuffed by the approved curriculum and a meager budget.

Meanwhile, your young innate imagination goes into pre-adolescent arrest and your Teacher’s dream of instructing you in an inspired, holistic, “outside the box” manner is summarily trashed. Forget any maverick ways or means of preserving wonder, of broadening creativity and analytical thinking, of nurturing your brain’s neurons and dendrites – test scores are all that matter.

Enslavement masquerading as “accountability.”

Just another offshoot of The Program’s prime directive.

So you sit in the classroom believing you’re at choice because most of the test questions grant you multiple choice. The truth is, you’re just moving things around inside the box. Meantime, THE REAL YOU, that dreamy, impractical, mystical YOU, is drifting out the classroom window reaching, gasping, grasping for… you’re not sure what… but you know it’s better.

That, Dear Human, is your subconscious fighting for recognition. For survival. It knows the way to wisdom and free “thinking” – neither of which has anything to do with language, letters, repetition or a #2 pencil.

It saddens me to see teachers under such pressure. I heard the other day of a few who actually killed themselves after a major newspaper ranked them according to some bullshit Value Added Measurement (VAM). No wonder the burnout rate is so high within the profession.

That minstrel-poet, Bob Dylan, put it well:

“Although the Masters make the rules, for the wise men and the fools, I’ve got nothin’, Ma, to live up to…”

No, you sure as hell don’t. None of you do. Because even the so-called Masters have unconsciously allowed themselves to become tools of The Program’s enslavement protocol.

Each stage of child development represents an era of evolution for human intelligence. Unfortunately, the Corpus Callosum, that structure joining the two halves of your brain, isn’t as large as it used to be. Today, there’s not as much interchange between the two halves. So now your ability to REASON is at constant war with your ancient desire to BELIEVE.

And that is why, Dear Humans, you’re moving along at a snail’s pace toward recapturing the power of your subconscious – a power directly connected to the Unified Field.

A power that can override the dark machinations of The Program.