It was one of my key motivations to get out NOW before my kid's too far along in indoctrination. I was a teenager in the 80s and as such, college was forbidden. When the Borg came out with their softened stance regarding higher education in the 90s I was PISSED. I have never gotten over that. Then, when the Borg began cracking down on college again, I saw that my child was likely to go through the same thing I did unless I got her out of the cult asap. Our children's future careers shouldn't be dependent on the whims of a handful of crackpots who have never worked a full-time job in their lives.
This could have been written by my sister as she feels the exact same way. There's a significant age difference between her and myself. I asked her some time ago before I started lurking here whether or not she remembered convention talks that subliminally criticized marriage while at the same time encouraged pioneering during the 80's. I was a kid then, but I always seemed to remember that for some reason to this day. I figured she would have remembered this. What prompted me to ask the question was a discussion I had with my uber-brainwashed mother who firmly denies the WT ever discouraged marriage for pioneering either in printed word, or spoken from the platform. So the next time I saw and spoke with my sister I asked her. She remembered and verified it for me. It led to us conversing about other related matters such as education. She told me, "you had it better than we did. We couldn't even consider a two year college."
Her and her husband both are doing pretty well for themselves, but she's expressed to me on more than one occasion that pioneering was a waste of time, and she did it for a good decade from what I remember. She's expressed gratitude toward my father who demanded that she stop pioneering back then, if only momentarily, in order to go school briefly so she would be able take care of herself. The part time job she had while pioneering was insufficient for life's necessities. My dad worked hard to make sure we weren't raised in the projects. He viewed her pioneering and part time work as building a future towards the projects or similar. She went through a crash course that got her better part time employment, and then she pioneered for some time afterwards. Eventually she saw the futility in pioneering, and started working full time, and she got married. When she stated that my generation of JWs had it better than her generation, she was speaking on the laxing of anti-college sentiments when I was a teenager. Like you said Mad Sweeny, they're tightening their grip again. The most recent assembly had a speaker liken those who pursue higher education to seeking a better cabin room on the Titanic.
