In the thick web of American mainstreaming there is hope, hope in the misfit, the mad, the rebellious student. These types of characters possess a gift of stubbornness that continues to renew humanity. Freire speaks of a 'banking' education with tones of oppression, but is it not those marginalized individuals who as a result of their alienation transcend their education no matter how pedantic and in many cases forward our understanding of the human condition? It is the Albert Einstein's and the Bob Dylan's of the world who share a place in a list of individuals who go unrecognized and often misunderstood in the shadows and recesses of the system of education. They are incubated with mockery and callousness and come out on another side in spite of their mistreatment as being truly visionary.

It is an unwillingness to concede to the myopia of educational norms by particular outcasts beginning at an early age that introduces an alternate vision and does not contribute to the dry and dusty educational narrative that occurs in American high schools. It comes down to the quality and strength of an individual by the time they enter high school to ultimately have enough courage and enough inner freedom to unconditionally be and believe in themselves. With my situation, it was a plain superficial lack of physical stature that brought me my first stones in grade school, then it grew into something far different in high school that set me apart - my worldview did not have a niche in the rural upstate New York setting.

There were a variety of students and teachers who could not accept me through their fear and their imprinting that there was no reference to being an individual. It seemed that as long as you joined the football team and talked in the echoing cement hallways with all those layers of wax reverberating last night's game you seemed to be in a comfortable place, but if you stepped outside the circle and began forming your own values, your own belief systems, and your own line of questioning life was not a care free ride. Everything in my life at that time was so god damned conditional I could barely breathe.

As I was being educated, if you can call it that, I had numerous opportunities to defy this canned sense of reality, to break the paradigm and attempt to transcend the average educational process. Process, yes, that's the image that was stuck in my head as I went through high school, the image of children being lined up on a factory conveyer belt all flowing into a human size meat grinder. With this in mind education was not an event to just sit back on your crucifix and let it happen to you.

It's a funny aspect of life that when you see in movies like Serpico or Dead Poets Society where people make a choice to be human, to disavow a mechanized lifeless existence, and to simply attempt to make the world a better place and the world takes its praetorian hammer and BANGS that thumb right down. I saw something awry when I was younger with how others and I were being educated and sought in my own way to do something about it. I said to myself I deserve just like any other soul to have an education that is on my level or else I was just wasting my time, but those who I was in contact with, parents, principals, friends told me to just play the game. That always stirred Dionysian energy in my gut; I never could accept that game.

What was I being given, how if I put up with the bull shit like the good little boys do I'll get a good paying job to go spend money at the mall and be able to go buy a nice ranch. I knew that convention would never be enough to satisfy me my hunger was too great. I had a hunger for a different world, for a home, for a place where there was love as the law and where people didn't rue around like beasts hating one another, hating their lives. I had a hunger for not being coerced into listening to how great America was for winning the war after dropping the bomb on the Japanese. If I did well in classes like that what does that say about my ethics.

I remember the high school principal telling me, 'I talk to your teachers, yeah I do that, they all say you read your books.'� There was a good degree of truth in this, after the training you're supposed to get from schooling when does your role in your education come to matter. Your voice, your critical opinion adds to the dialogue in a manner that the Draconian authority cannot stomach or comprehend. You create a coup de grace on their own preconceptions of what the student body is when you start laying advanced critical theory like Gestalt or Nietzsche on their inebriated classroom exercises. Time, accursed time, or disinterest must have limited the exploration into what I thought was the relevance of mathematical or general lessons.

I remember those multiple experiences in classrooms of having untrained, unmechanized questions to add that was on the topic, but exceeded the topic and drew in a larger issue with far more nuance. Now this is all good you would think, aiding the classroom experience. First it's asking the alternate line of thinking to be developed, the raising of the hand that I always felt was patronizing like nothing changed since kindergarten. Getting the question out with absolute sincerity was something I believed was important. Then, the silence, and the students response to free thought was always the same--discomfort. A giggle here and there was expected because some felt they had entered the wrong class. It's pathetic realities like this that made me want to weep at times because of how unfree all this land of the free home of the brave crap was in reality. Kids have been close to being completely grinded down, there like commanded robotics. They turn and look back with fear and loathing at freedom that they could never understand. The fact of the matter is I didn't think I was participating in a bizarre way because I was only trying to get the most out of what I was offered and perhaps I didn't feel that I had to be bashful about it. I heard people tell me all the time 'You can't do that,'� I responded, 'Why not?'�

There was often the stammering teacher who doesn't want to teach anything but his scheduled regimented lesson that he didn't even have any freedom to create, he's sequestered by the school board. There is always something larger to pulverize the human spirit. I think that that's the problem with the system: it's a top down works and the farther down you are the less you are heard or respected.

And it is really this feature that ties it all in. How do they keep this dying show on the road? The idea of an elite who makes choices for a large mass of individuals undermines any possibility in the educative spirit. Take me for instance, on the bottom rung, had I not had a natural bad attitude I would have been just another sheep going along with whatever authority said was the truth. And there lies the problem: Only in rare cases do new ideas enter and when they do they get institutionalized. An Educational system based on a more on an egalitarian model just stands to reason as a more logical organizing principle. The knowledge from under taken for madness by a majority, is for me is where all the hope for a reasonable co interdependent world seems to reside. It is up to us to step out of our conformity and listen for it.

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