College is a bunch of rooms where you sit for two thousand hours or so and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years. You spend the rest of the time starving, sleeping, drinking, and trying not to get raped.
Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
2. Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).
The latter are things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.
After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, or geology, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with the exact answer the professor has in mind, you fail.
The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form coffee, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology—subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:
ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby Dick, anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.
PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.
PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.
SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory behavior forms." If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.
Yep, pretty much. Although, the only thing I will say in defense of some classes, maybe more so those in high school, is this: I remember classmates complaining about studying stuff like algebra, math, geometry, chemistry, etc. "When am I ever gonna need this in the real world?"
ReplyDeleteIt took me a while after I was out in the real world, but I finally had an answer for them. If you don't learn math, you can't make change, balance your checkbook or know the value of stuff and whether you're being ripped off. I learned about statistics and probabilities and how likely certain events are.
Geometry taught me a lot about logic and proving an argument step by step. Algebra taught me how to calculate my gas mileage and helped me realize that there are ways that scientists can calculate things like the trajectory of getting a lander on the moon, or how fast a Camaro can accelerate (and how fast its tires will wear out when you drive like a maniac).
Whether I actually ever use a lot of what I learned and have since forgotten (still like to figure out stuff with algebra, though), is not so important. What is important and what I do remember is being able to discern what is possible and logical. I learned how to think critically. So when someone spouts some inane sounding statistic or claim, I have some idea of whether they are credible or not and how to either figure it out myself, or evaluate a counter claim. I can tell Flat Earthers to go jump in a lake, because if they swim far enough, they will disappear over the horizon.
This is all tongue-in-cheek, of course. I do think, however, that the teaching of the practical life skills you mention is of far more importance than the rote memorization we were all subjected to.
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