Our idealized scripts vs. reality. Spoiler: (reality wins)

            We live in a deceptively contradictory world.  I was born in 1980, the year Reagan was elected.  From the beginning of my education in pre-school, almost all of the authority figures around me gave me the same rehearsed lines:  "You can be and do anything you want when you grow up.  We live in a free country.  Everyone is equal in our country. . ." and et-cetera.  I'm sure you're all familiar with the mantras, even if they might not have been directed at you, like they were me.  But fundamentally, it is all untrue.  You can't, for example, be an Air Force pilot if you don't have perfect 20/20 vision.  No amount of hard work or American tenacity can change one's eyesight, and the Air Force doesn't believe in corrective laser surgery (and for good reason). 

            Our education system is obsessed with sending kids directly to college after high school.  We are so obsessed, in fact, that when I was student teaching we took an 8th grade class on a field trip to Hobart and William Smith colleges in Geneva, where they were quite literally "soda'd and dined" and given a rousing sales pitch for the school (in a multi-million dollar room with a glass wall overlooking Seneca Lake).  If you've never been to Hobart and William Smith, it happens to be one of the most beautiful college campuses in the North East, and a very idealized picture of what most college campuses are NOT like.  On the bus there, I thought about some of the students who were coming from families who were struggling, who would never be able to afford the 60k per year that it costs to go to Hobart, let alone the cost of a state school like Brockport.  For some of those students, the time wasted on college prep would have been time better spent teaching them how to navigate the impossibly intricate and arcane social "safety net" systems.  Perhaps a field trip to the Rochester DSS office, where they could have waited in the lobby with screaming children and angry people for three or four hours before a simulated "appointment" (where they would be given no useful information while being made to feel insignificant), might have been more beneficial.

            That sounds cynical, but when you think about it, how often do we educate people in how to utilize our social welfare systems?  Then again, how dare we not assume that everyone in a given kindergarten classroom won't grow up to be an astronaut, doctor, lawyer or senator.  This disconnect between reality and our fictional, ideal reality, is exactly what James Kelman and Ali Smith are grappling with in their works, and both are different pictures of the shattered ideology of neoliberalism.