Socien's Blog

Dear Chris: I know you do not like the name “Christian” but it is the one I am used to. It takes getting used to, right? And I am so sure you will be used to my argument that the formal education system is not all roses. You might think that all I am doing and what I have been doing in the past is to indoctrinate you into detesting the education system, but I only wish that you could see stones in the roses and luck them out. After all what else can make a human better educated than the education system?

When your family struggle to get you up there, where most of you kind will never get a chance you must hold on tight when you get the chance. I am the fifth person in my village to have gotten the chance to get to the University College. Why I decided to drop out. Let me take you kid through our family history.

At the very peak of our family’s earning capacity our parents could earn around $7,000 a year—that is 2004. A second peak can be in 2011. Mom won a promotional contest from the then-biggest mobile network services provider. $2000 was a health addition to the family’s earnings. (All these earnings are the reason why you grew up being told that we were not a poor family when we were poor. Of course, every parent is a leader and telling the kids that we are doomed is a bad leadership style, but it is important to let them know at some stage that the family is poor).

By 2016, when I started my degree programme which required $2,000 yearly the family’s annual income was in a decline. $6,500, $6,000 and $5,000 are  my assumptions for the years 2016, 2017 and 2018, respectively. In 2019, it got way worse, dad’s monthly salary plunging to an all-time low of $35 from its 2013 peak of $500.

Our extended family had its smart and hardworking members amassing massive wealth. 2019 was the perfect time to join them, and get some help if this degree certificate meant anything to me. These wealth lords sought to help me while I avoided them and blocked any line of communication. I also did this blockade just to have a monopoly on decision-making concerning the things happening in my life but to suffer more. My perception is no one can make any difference without having suffered. Suffering can spell the difference. When easy is the bridge between you and an achievement, that very achievement does not intend to invite other achievements that are willing only to come out of a tough fight.

I dropped out of college in the final semester of 2019, April, just a month closer to the final exams. The University in its terms can argue that I deferred especially given the fact that I would later return in 2022 to do the completion. What brought me back again was not the degree certificate which remains uncollected somewhere on the University’s campus. If I had continued without completing I would have rendered myself homeless in 2022. (This is a me subject and I hope it will teach you something about me and my ill-perception of the education system. I do not intend to preach myself as a guy or to tarnish the image of relatives who have been there to help and those I resisted help from).

The girl I loved

In February 2019, a girl, (you’ll have to ask me in person her name, I seek to protect her identity), was again back into my life. In the previous year she had blocked me across all online chatting platforms straight to text messages in the previous year. Whatever this was, we were still madly in love. But I had not seen her since the day I had left for my studies in August 2016.

This character would later be inducted into my hall of fame, where she would come fourth after our parents, our maternal Uncle Herbet and you my siblings. As she was approaching her eightenth birthdays she met and fell for a guy at twenty-one who had not any girl before. She made me arrive home late at 20:00hrs every Sunday after a church service until August 2016. Then we quickly lost it.

Our return to working terms in 2019 did not package but sealed my fate. To make her feel welcome I thought the idea of dropping out of College was not bad. This, however, was an idea I already had developing in months leading to our getting back together. I thought she would feel at home when we would be both the same. A bank of my expectations had it that by the end of the year I would possibly be garnering an income of around a thousand dollar a month as an author. I was wrong. I had  to walk away unilaterally when this stood not to be the case.

Memories and the fact that I once had her gave me the songs I wrote beginning with “I found love”. It is not only the songs but a strange and appetising music genre in the history of band music. After so many love songs had been written I started to write my Letter to Ex-lover. That long letter is not only a collection my describing my experience with or without her, loved and heart borken, cheated and grateful, but is a reference point for all the songs classified as Quassa, the sub-genre.

Dropping out of College, I learned, provides room for getting what you cannot possibly get by simply staying at College up to the time you graduate. Dropping out of college, if intentional, can only become the source of some consciousness of something that is not missing but must be found. Of course, my recommendation to anyone is not to drop out of College unless he intentionally has to do so.

People who change our lives do not have to stay forever in our lives. These are people who get us to make unthinkable decisions and we get to a point when we have no choice but to follow up those decisions with proper actions. She is my number one reason behind my quitting College and we never had a photo together.

All over the world the Formal Education System is “broke”

It seeks to create the middle class and protect the upper tip of the class pyramid from whoever is educated formally. It ensures that whoever is educated gets stuck somewhere in the middle and ceases to be poor even when he is still a poor graduate. It truly seeks to create people who reason along the boundaries it sets. Free reasoning threatens the upper class and will threaten me when I become part of the upper class.

Brother, allow me to say to you that “middle classism” is a way of thinking. It is a mindset. A mindset is that which contains our thinking and it is the thinking engine that drives our thinking journey.

Middle-classists are intellects, people who are brighter than founders of big Companies listed. But they have been influenced to be what they are—middle-classists. Control is less of a burden than influence. That which controls you cannot only be felt but may be visible or can be discovered. The education system is a device for influencing our actual thinking by building our mindsets around a middle-classist core or node. Through this mindset learners and former learners avoid competing for their spot in the upper tip of the pyramid and resign to a competition in the middle. There in the middle competition is fierce.

Upper classism is a way of thinking. It is a mindset. But in this case, it has outsmarted any influence and gained control. The danger influence has is it manipulates and intoxicates. (If you intend to be part of the upper class learn formally. Once you are done think like you don’t think there was any sense of you getting to be educated formally. This is what the upper-classists do).

The likes of Mother Teresa dominated my primary education. Those are the famous figures we grew up being familiar with. The Catholic nun gave much of her life helping the poor in India. I admire her work and two of her quotes are in my top ten list. I also grew up in the Catholic church. There is nothing wrong with this. But when it comes to “heroism learning” the formal education system forgets to give us a mixed bag.

The education system avoids to teach us about the likes of Luis Vuitton. The once homeless and uneducated guys who later found companies must be served as a side dish to Mother Teresa. We may learn a lot about starting a business with primitive capital while learning about kindness. Our world cannot prosper with kindness alone. Kindness itself cannot survive a war for resources and poverty. A balance of both is necessary.

We need to learn much from those who tried and how they tried, thus “heroism learning” is a necessity. The assortment of heroes we learn about must be all-encompassing. If I learn only from the Mother Teresa class I end up being so soft, and a soothing material for the middle class. It is also wrong to teach about the Luis Vuitton and the Andrew Carnieges without mixing them with soft figures. The resulting competition and the lust to emerge high above the competition may cripple the world.

Your Celebrity, Soͼien.