The Medieval era is well known for being littered with feudal societies, ruled by royalty and served by serfs who kept the system running with back-breaking labor. Contrary to popular opinion, though, the serfs weren’t exactly what we would call ‘slaves.’ They definitely had more rights and opportunities than many of their ancestors from the Roman Empire, and they weren’t owned by other people.
Instead, they were merely ‘tied down.’ They often didn’t have the freedom to move about, not because there were walls and watchtowers keeping them penned up, but because they were beholden to the land. They had to pay part of their income if they wanted to stay on that land, and if they wanted any kind of protection.
And because their world was far more dangerous than ours, they desperately needed the protection of the lords and their soldiers, which meant that they couldn’t risk leaving their land for better opportunities. In most feudal societies, it wasn’t politics that kept the people down, it was their financial situation.
In much the same way that feudalism kept its people tied to the land for multiple generations, our current financial system is also producing a perpetual serf class; mainly through the issuance of student loans. Unlike most debts (of which we have plenty) there is no escaping these loans. In most cases, you don’t have the option to declare bankruptcy and start anew with a clean slate. As a result, many of our citizens are not only carrying heavy debts, they’re laying the groundwork for having indebted children as well.
Data analyzed exclusively by the AP, along with surveys about families and rising student-debt loads, show that:
• School loans increasingly belong to Americans over 40. This group accounts for 35% of education debt, up from 25% in 2004, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Contributing to this surge are longer repayment schedules, more midcareer workers returning to school, and additional borrowing for children’s education.
• Generation X adults — those 35 to 50 — owe about as much as people fresh out of college do. Student-loan balances average $20,000 for Generation X. Millennials, 34 and younger, have roughly the same average debt, according to a report by Pew Charitable Trusts.
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• Gen X parents who carry student debt and have teenage children have struggled to save for their children’s educations. The average they have in college savings plans is just $4,000, compared with a $20,000 average for teenagers’ parents who aren’t still repaying their own school loans, Pew found. A result is that many of their children will need to borrow heavily for college or pursue cheaper alternatives, thereby perpetuating a cycle of family debt.
• Student debt is surpassing groceries as a primary expense for many borrowers, with the gap widening most for younger families. The average college-educated head of the household under 40 owes $404 a month in student debt payments, according to an AP analysis of Fed data. That’s slightly more than what the government says the average college-educated family spends at the supermarket.
There are now two separate debt cycles at work here. Ever since the government started issuing these loans and made them nearly impossible to default on, it has given the colleges an incentive to raise prices. And since these loans allowed more people to go to college, the marketplace is saturated with college grads, and their education quality is often watered down. This means that the average person now needs a higher education to set themselves apart from their peers, which of course costs more money. And on and on it goes.
And these massive debts have spawned another horrible cycle between parents and their children. It’s already incredibly difficult to start a family when you owe tens of thousands of dollars, but for those who do, they now have less money to save for their children’s education. Surely, their progeny will also be burdened with debt if they decide to follow their parent’s footsteps. Considering that around half of America’s college graduates are stuck in jobs that don’t require a college degree, that would probably be an awful mistake to make.
Our society is already populated by millions of people working menial jobs while burdened with absurd debts that will keep them ‘tied down’ for the rest of their lives. So there really isn’t much distance left between us and our medieval ancestors. The only thing that was missing from this situation, was the passing of these debts to our children. However, we’re no longer robbing our future progeny with these debts. Now it’s happening to our children in the present. Feudal America has officially arrived for those who are trying to improve their lot in life with a college education.
Joshua Krause is a reporter, writer and researcher at The Daily Sheeple. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is a freelance writer and author. You can follow Joshua’s reports at Facebook or on his personal Twitter. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger .
This is an excellent article by Joshua Krause who clearly explains the problems facing developed nations that treat education as a for profit commodity and not a free public resource. All student debt should be cancelled with arrears written off at zero cost to students. Real high quality free publicly funded education to students benefits society as a whole. It helps maintain civilisation which is why everyone should be able to access free publicly funding high quality lifelong education and training with entry based on ability and commitment. Real education should also be free from propaganda and support critical thinking and everyone should be able to choose the subject areas that interest and motivate them based on ability without coercion and exploitation with the option to choose as many varied subjects over a lifetime. Poverty through student debt is one way the ruling elite is using capitalism to try and discourage and reduce population growth around the world however this also increases an ageing population and decreases productivity, tax revenues and output which the ruling elite offset by increased migration which is merely projecting population, economic and demographic problems into the future.
History of American Education
by John Taylor Gatto
One task it performed with brilliance was to sharply curtail the American entrepreneurial spirit, a mission undertaken on perfectly sensible grounds, at least from a management perspective. As long as capital investments were at the mercy of millions of self-reliant, resourceful young entrepreneurs running about with a gleam in their eye, who would commit the huge flows of capital needed to continually tool and retool the commercial/industrial/financial machine? As long as the entire population could become producers, young people were loose cannons crashing around a storm-tossed deck, threatening to destroy the corporate ship; confined, however, to employee status, they became suitable ballast upon which a dependable domestic market could be erected.
EXTENDING CHILDHOOD
From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, it was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political State needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance.
Woodrow Wilson to businessmen before the First World War : We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under control of a group referred to in the press of that day as “the Education Trust.” The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote the British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd in 1918, was to “impose on the young the ideal of subordination.” Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of management.
The ability of Americans to think as independent producers had to be curtailed. Certain writings of Alexander Inglis carry a hint of schooling’s role in this ultimately successful project to curb the tendency of little people to compete with big companies.
Gatto is brilliant as is Charlotte Iserbyt.
BTW, years ago I read a biography of one of my favorite scientists, physicist Richard Feyman, in which he described his experience sitting on a panel that recommended and approved math textbooks (can’t recall, but I think it was for the high school level). Feyman said he was apparently the only person on the committee to carefully go through the material and he was aghast the textbooks didn’t teach the kids problem solving skills. Feyman also recounted in another chapter how academics tried to recruit him into supporting a world socialist system. This is shortly after WWII.
Crodo Dile has it correct. The main goals of modern day Elite-directed education are infantiliization, dumbing down, conditioning, indoctrination, and hoop jumping for elite controlled ‘certification’.
A good basic education shouldn’t be expensive in the information age. Moreover, a world class education should be accessible to most people via the internet for FREE or nearly so. But then how would Bill Gates push his weight around Khan Academy and other free online education ventures to make sure they don’t evolve into something the elites can’t control.
Problem with resetting the debt / loan forgiveness, and hyperinflation (or steady year over year high inflation) will effectively do the same, is this will be the stepping stone to the international banksters’ Big Brother global digital currency and then onto their energy credit scheme for their Orwellian Technocracy final “solution”. There is a reason the NWO pope called for a debt jubilee and the Establishment recently floated the idea of re-allowing student loan debt discharge in bankruptcy filings. As well, hard core bankster kowtowing socialist Bernie Sanders is recommending a Wall Street Tax to go towards education. Two in one, prop up the current system and slip in a Trojan global tax.