Pay Six Figures to Memorize Cliff’s Notes

I got an obscene comment today. Here’s the unbelievable part. It was from a liberal. No, it had to be a GOP fake. Liberals always take the high road, right? Darn that Karl Rove. For a minute, he fooled me.

The funniest thing about it was that it came from a university. Obviously, someone’s parents’ money has been well spent!

We live in a time where people gladly pay institutions over twenty thousand dollars per year to teach their kids to take drugs, fornicate, give up their belief in God, bring curses on themselves and their families, read Cliff’s Notes, and absorb creaky, discredited leftist notions that bring mankind only suffering. Don’t ever try to tell me God wasn’t right on the money when he described us as sheep. When it comes to judgment, just about any mammal you can name is superior to man. Find me another animal that would base jump or smoke cigarettes.

For the most part, universities are gigantic wastes of money. In two weeks, a smart person who doesn’t watch TV all day can absorb everything a school can offer in a liberal arts course, with none of the bias and BS. At a cost of maybe a hundred bucks, if he buys his own books. Gas money, if he uses a library.

Seriously, how much time did you have to put in to get a B+ in a literature or history course, or in a nonsense course like sociology or black studies? Be honest. Two or three days of cramming, at the end of each semester, unless you had to write a paper. I had to take anthropology to “balance” my physics and math courses when I was in school. I studied for about a day, and I got an A. Try that in multivariable calculus and see what happens. If you’re Norbert Wiener, you can do it. Otherwise, expect to fail. Most college courses are a tremendous ripoff. And strangely, we don’t care. All over the US, there are people who don’t mind paying several thousand dollars for a child to study a course like the history of comic books or–here’s a good real-life example–the textual appeal of Tupac Shakur.

Man, think about that. What does a course cost at a private college? About four grand, I’d say. Would you invite someone into your house and pay them four large to teach you about Tupac Shakur? If not, why would you pay it to a university?

If we really cared about educating kids, we’d have accredited tutors who visited them twice a week. “Here’s your assignment. I’ll be back in three days. Know it, or your parents will take away everything that makes your life bearable.” That would work for any course not requiring special equipment. It’s how kings used to educate their kids. These days, we just shove them into the pen with the rest of the livestock and send them checks.

A lot of people think one of the best things about college life is that it gets kids away from their parents. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contact with our elders is an essential source of strength, guidance, and knowledge. This is why drug abuse and fornication are so big on college campuses. Mom and Dad and their values are a thousand miles away. If we really wanted to have a society with strong values, we’d go back to living in extended families, like people in the Bible did.

For decades, professors have been telling us our parents are idiots. Guess what? Your parents are treasures. They know a lot of things that can help you, and unlike your professors, they care more about you than they do about themselves. Your professors, on the other hand, probably ARE idiots. How do you think they ended up in academia? It wasn’t because their mad skills had the private sector chasing after them. Tenure used to exist because academic pay was too low, and job security was supposed to make up for it. Now it exists in spite of astronomical pay and benefits, simply because many academics can’t survive without it. Put an English Literature Ph.D. on the street, take away his cradle-to-grave benefits, and see what happens to him. I can tell you what WON’T happen to him. Private firms won’t offer him big money to teach them about The Canterbury Tales.

Here’s another bit of bleak news for academics. Now that we have DVDs and the Internet, it is easier than ever to completely replace professional instructors. Do you really need to subsidize an old hippie’s artificially grandiose lifestyle in order to learn college material? I’d rather buy a couple of disks.

I often say that the only people who get their money’s worth from universities are those who study things like languages, science, math, and music. Things that can’t be taught via cramming. But truthfully, you can learn all these things without instructors (or at least without costly institutions). When I studied physics and math, very often I had bad teachers and bad books. I solved these problems by buying other books and reading on my own. While I was studying first-semester calculus, I had a good teacher, but I had no background, so I studied algebra at the same time, from a book which probably cost fifteen dollars. My first mechanics teacher was so arrogant and incompetent, he nearly qualified as mentally ill. I survived by dumping Fetter & Walecka (the execrable text he liked) and buying Schaum outlines. Now that I think about it, there were a number of times when my teachers and their chosen books did me no good whatsoever. What was I paying them for? The grades, I guess. Everything else, I got on my own.

We spend too much money on secondary education. Maybe we should be working to develop a better system. Many, many courses could be replaced by tests. Show up, prove you know differential geometry, get credit, move on. Cost: $150 for proctoring and grading. Wouldn’t that make more sense than spending four thousand dollars? We already have a lot of tests to help us avoid unnecessary study. Maybe we need more of them. It’s insane to make someone spend a big six-figure sum and waste four years, just to become a member of a cubicle farm. Do you really have to spend three hundred grand to produce the Pointy-Haired Boss? I don’t think so.

Now that I think about it, I still don’t know differential geometry. I got an A in graduate mechanics anyway, but I think that was because only four students survived to take the final exam. I would really like to go back over that stuff and learn it. It’s one of those mathematical disciplines that requires memorization as well as reasoning ability; I didn’t work hard enough at it to memorize the little details that make it work.

It would never be of any use to me, but it irritates me that I never got a grip on it. I wonder if my memory problems would permit me to learn it.

I added some filters to the comment system today, so hopefully, juvenile, unintelligent remarks like the one I received this morning will be filed appropriately before I have to deal with them.