Richmond Secondary College * by Flick Ruby * Bashings, Blunders and Bloody Socialists Answering machines are pretty vile. I never have my rave all nice and compact for them and end up getting cut off half way. During the Richmond Secondary College campaign the telephone tree woke me up at 5.30 am so many times I considered becoming a logger and setting up a protection society against branch leaders. Whoever our branch leader was, they got to speak to our newly inherited answering machine and heard Richard Nixon and a few chicken squarking messages but they were not swayed. Unfortunately a few friends up the road just kept ringing and singing so I would give them a lift. I'm glad I went down because I really believe that the form and content of education is the most insidious way of creating a uniform mentality of conformity and passive, mute, obedient citizens. Education is one of the first state institutions that people find themselves in at age 5. It's like the first meat mincer we are forced into and we come out a bland kind of hamburger mince at the end. Basically, the mind is colonised in the present school system by the ideology of patriarchal capitalism with its scientific death fetishes and its great 'objective' knowledge. While I'm critical of the present system, what it is set up to achieve and what it produces, I'm sure that learning could be different, much different. Dawkin's great quantum leaps backwards in 1988 are being continued by Kennett by reducing accessibility to education, by cutting socially critical subjects and by making education a degree granting assembly line. About 160 schools across Victoria have been closed down by Kennett, a disguisting display of governmental priorities. Lots of people down at Richmond became actively involved for the first time which is good. Others saw it as a great oppportunity to further their careers as pyramid newspaper sellers, some got a real ego preening out of the whole affair and the state got to test out new and exciting ways to bash and spy on people. The campaign isn't over but it's over for me. I got pretty fucked off with it all especially the repetitive ritual of being dragged away every morning by cops who were politely allowed to cross the picket line en mass. I think that's madness and part of the great "We can placate the police and let's not alienate the public" line. I think some people woke up to this one. At one stage I was standing linking arms with people in front of the gates and a woman with a kindergarten teacher voice came up and said 'What's the key word? PASSIVE resistance'. She should have brought flash cards.