Rage Against the Machines [and the people that run them]

It's easy to contextualise every authored work on this blog as an extended rant built on spur-of-the-moment anger, and those who'd do so for the large part would be making a correct assessment. It's also easy, as their author, to look back through the catalogued entries and feel a little foolish: was I ever that angry, about something so trivial? And then I the justification of the moment hits home, and I stop judging. Of course I was that angry, as a sensible man I have no reason to work on undirected or unreasonable angst; if I have rage, there has to be a reason for it.

Today's gear-grinding, tree-punching, bottle-hurling angst is directed towards, what do you know, the workings of mankind. Specifically, the workings and expectations of those who as supervisory components of the modern workflow system. The anger that forms the basis of this diatribe stems from the abysmal final exam for Marine Ecology that I had just sat for earlier today. Now all students would feel entitled to voice a certain aggrievance post-examination, doubtless the stress of sitting and making a halfhearted attempt to take the course material seriously is beyond many people's capacities. This exam however, was consensually and undoubtedly an utter farce, of the type that would make me want to get drunk on cheap sherry and end the night shouting tearfully at a lamp post. In its perpetuation, this exam fully encapsulated what is wrong with the current academic system, and in an even more universal context, the rest of the developed world.

The thing you have to understand first and foremost is most subjects have what I like to call an 'individual arrogance'. This affects the way a course structures its workload and assessment weightings; at its most extreme manifestation, a course is built like it is the only course a student takes all semester, with an intensely heavy workload and in-depth syllabus. This is what aggrieves me most: the people who coordinate and formulate such courses tend to forget the average student takes at least two other courses in a single semester. The stupidity of the reality is that every course has similarly upped its ante in order to not lag behind the others in difficulty. Put basically, university courses these days overload students. Veterans of the institution tell of the sepia-tinted days when courses used to comprise even more information and even more intensive hours, and speak of a dumbing down of information contained within current syllabuses. The reality is however that students in those days didn't have to take three, four, or even five courses, each competing with one another to provide above and beyond the ever-increasing information threshold.

In a way, current students are victims of the outburst in science and information. Our understanding and interpretation of science has grown exponentially in the space of one generation. Entire new fields of study have sprung up where previously there existed nothing more than a blank on the information map. Study methods have been revised, critiqued, and subsequently streamlined so more information has been wrought from even more sources. It is like the ancient Chinese proverb: every road has a million roads branching off it, and each of those roads a million more. The onus is now on academic courses to condense ever more information into increasingly short timescales. One cannot help but feel like part of a machine, constantly chugging along on a conveyor belt along the length of which robotic arms attach more inputs before sending one along on his/er own merry way. The old courses could afford to be in-depth; there were just one or two of them, and they lasted for a year. Under the terms of my foreign student visa, I am obliged to take four subjects every four months, the length of one semester, each subject attempting to condense even more information into its syllabus into a third of the time. Assuming there is little information overlap between courses, it is the closest anyone can come to a true multiverse complex. Specialising is an illusion; it's like discussing restaurants, boutiques and bookstores in the context of a mall. Everything is contained, sure, but everything is near-discrete from the everything else, the bonds flimsy at best, where each turn is like walking into something entirely different from the other.

Technological advancement has also played a major role. Development of new technology used to work in tandem with the idea of convenience; with technology, the machines would do the work, or at least allow us to work faster, leaving us with time to relax. Now the innocence of that utopian 70s ideal has been replaced with one of a voracious slave endeavour; technology allows us to work faster, allowing us the space and time to do more work. The idea that we would be given time to recoup our efforts and maintain some semblance of mental stability is no more, instead people in the position to give out work have created a work dynamic in which people are expected to do more with the time they have. Of course, this conveniently aids the world of new science: with more information to be processed, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of making people do more within a shorter period. With that in mind, it's easy to understand why many students struggle within the work capacity expected of them. The academia expect too much, too soon. When you realise applying this to a system which advocates, no, DEMANDS, a reliance on memorising everything, and we all know it's impossible for any one average student to remember everything in a syllabus no matter how many times he/she has gone through it, you realise that there is nothing left in this world but to be futilely swamped by an information overload that sweeps you up in its vicious, viscous current and leaves one left on the bank miles downstream, burned out and jaded.

Of course, it's easy to complain as one of the average folk. The fact is though the system is engineered to encompass and cater for the upper bracket of student capability. There are of course, students who are more than well-equipped to deal with the strain of the current work system. They are though an exotic animal, ludicrously talented individuals who through one or a combination of an inhumanely unwavering work ethic and an incredibly large information quotient eventually pull through, and are exceptions, by no means the rule. The system and the people that run it is not wrong in having to accommodate these people, and in this sense the system seems to become less of an issue and more of a necessary evil. The problem is people mis-comprehend the way Nature works in this regard; it's not that these students adapt to the system, it's that they have the tools that allow them to.

We also then have to factor the illusory behaviour of most modern people: the parents and academicians who feel everyone has an equal capacity to be a genius and as such endeavour to push and belabour their proteges in order that they may achieve the goals expected of them. They've thus created a system which just cannot understand that not everyone is created equal, that for every leading rider and chaser there is a massive peloton which will never have a sniff without either or both of an incredible piece of luck, or an incredibly superhuman event of endeavour.

Today's exam was a culmination of all that, combined with a thoroughly catastrophic implementation. In the current style of ecology, even the most basic principle ties in with a panoply of others, making even a basic question function like an essay. You could just identify everything that's wrong with the world when you read that we had seven of what were effectively essays, to be done within one and a half hours. With so much information from the syllabus being covered, were we given time to think? No. Were we allowed even a slight pause to gain composure? No. Instead we had a mind-numbingly breathless and cruel exam where everyone's ability was severely compromised. Not one person I know finished the exam. I struggle to think that there might be even worse examples of such horrendous undertakings, instead I have to come to terms that I and my classmates had the misfortune to be saddled with an incredibly absurd and intensely frustrating endeavour which has done nothing more than substantiate my loss of faith in humanity, which has itself suffered a grievous loss of plot.