On the Poverty of Student Life

“Don't let schooling interfere with your education.” Mark Twain

“Once upon a time the universities had a certain prestige; the student persists in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he came too late. His mechanical, specialized education is as profoundly degraded (in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture) as his own intellectual level, because the modern economic system requires a mass production of uneducated students who have been rendered incapable of thinking. The university has become an institutional organization of ignorance. “High culture” is being degraded in the assembly-line production of professors, all of whom are cretins and most of whom would be jeered by any audience of highschoolers. But the student, in his mental menopause, is unaware of all this; he continues to listen respectfully to his masters, conscientiously suppressing all critical spirit so as to immerse himself in the mystical illusion of being a “student” — someone seriously devoted to learning serious things — in the hope that his professors will ultimately impart to him the ultimate truths of the world. The future revolutionary society will condemn all the noise of the lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but verbal pollution. The student is already a very bad joke.” Mustapha Omar Khayati

The Now Here Come The Now LP (Last Year's Youth Records, 2003)

The Now – You Student

The Fall Middle Class Revolt LP (Permanent Records, 1994)

The Fall – Hey! Student

Yeah Yeah Noh The Cottage Industry EP (In Tape, 1984)

Yeah Yeah Noh – Tommy Opposite

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For further reading, please check out On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, With a Modest Proposal for Doing Away With It by members of the Situationist International and students of Strasbourg University (1966).