There's more than one way to be "educated."

Made my own spoken word. Please supply your own sweeping musical score to accompany your reading.

I had a little trouble in writing this rebuttal. I was confused when David Beckham was held up as an example of something higher. Adidas shoes and FIFA balls...is it satire? Are we to include athletics within our educational horizon? Is footballing a path to transcending the system's oppression?

Our society is built on pipes pumping water, electricity and information into the walls of our buildings and shipping calories to places where we can pick them up with minimal labor. That leisure enables man to poeticize or philosophize or just feel awesome. I feel like paying no honor to those who, through ignorance or choice, serve this system, is a bit solipsistic.

But that's okay, the system will pay them. And our poet will give voice to the Zuckenbergs of the world, the people who go on red and stop on green and help us achieve this make-believe of thinkin' outside the "box." It's a comforting thought. That building someone else's dream to help yourself is a paradox. But it's not. That's a trick. The leisure afforded the poet is what helps create the Matrix. When I hear "redefine education" in this spoken word I don't see a road around my "mental suppression," I feel like a bird. I see how I'm in a cage, surrounded by wire, and how each one of them is a poet trying to make me feel inspired.

"No rational person could ever possibly believe that there is any tension between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' culture. Cultural rebellion is not a threat to the system--it is the system." -Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter, two PhDs, teaching at university.

If you seek to undermine education (in some small, reasonable way), you need institutional power, because otherwise you're just a derivative of this guy, down to the fonts and camera angles. And if you have that power, and can change system, prepare to have it assimilate your view point and teach it within. That's what the academy does, it co-ops whatever is persuasive, and through the strictures of "school" makes that idea invasive. I agree, the implementation of school by small minds is abrasive, but if you can make it through to the other side, you can actually change the system.