tensix

School is really pissing me off at the moment. I spent today studying for a class that is more or less a repeat of another class I took last semester. I am in my third year of a computer science degree, and aside from obscure language syntax I have never and will never use beyond the scope of one class (and yet still could have taught myself with half the time and no budget), I have yet to learn anything. Ultimately, you don't even really learn anything in university. If you're lucky, you learn how to learn. And yet most jobs I am considering doing require me to have a piece of paper that more or less amounts to saying that I didn't drool into my keyboard enough to kill me during four years and tens of thousands of dollars of school.

The big issue I have is that classes even as low as elementary school and even as high as university appeal to the lowest common denominator. If one kid is too much of a dumbass to get it, the rest of the class is dragged back until he figures it out. Classes the next level up compensate for this. Call me needlessly Darwinistic if you want, but I still say that if one person doesn't understand something, it should be that person's responsibility to get up to speed, not the class' responsibility to slow down for every dumbass who takes a university level programming course without understanding the concept of a simple loop. And if that person still can't cut it, maybe they don't belong in school.

Part of the problem is sports. University really has become the new high school in that sense. More and more you see the same dumbass jocks that you went to high school with sitting beside you in university classes. They're still no more intelligent on average than a really bright eggplant, and yet there they are. Most of them are there on sports scholarships. Even the name itself is a giant oxymoron... "sports scholarship". It ranks right up there with the likes of "jumbo shrimp", "military intelligence", and "good morning". But if more and more idiots are getting degrees and none of them are any smarter, what's happening? The content is being dumbed down. Even within the short time I have been at university, I have seen this happen. Three years after I took them, many of my first year classes are already ditching some of the concepts that they once taught. People look at the statistics and are happy that more and more people are attending university. But it's not a good thing. Most intelligent people were already going, and that proportion isn't changing. What's changed is that more and more stupid people are going, and bogging the system down like they did all through elementary and high school.

Another part of the problem is that people equate education with intelligence. This is not the case. You can train a monkey to cook food, but it's still just a trained monkey, and nobody would call it a chef. Just the same, you can educate an idiot, but then he'll just be an educated idiot. Absorbing information is not the same thing as intelligence if you do not understand that information. I can tell you what an aneurysm is, where it develops, what it can do, and how to treat it. But to say that this equates to an understanding is absurd. I can regurgutate the facts, but as I have no medical background, I do not understand them in the slightest. The same can be said about much of what is taught in university. If you can parrot out information, you will do just fine and graduate with little difficulty, without having learned a thing.

Of course, our instructors cannot escape all blame either. Universities hire most people not on the basis of whether they can teach anything, but because of the research they can do that the university can take prestige and profit from. That is why many of my professors, while no doubt fairly bright in their respective fields, often cannot string together so much as a single coherent english sentence, or properly explain even the simplest of concepts. Add to that the rampant nepotism that has infiltrated almost every facet of society, and the simony that is possible by doing the boring administrative things that nobody else wants to do, and you get people teaching in universities that would not otherwise be qualified to slice a loaf of bread. That's why there is a woman in the CS department at the university I attend who has a degree in environmental engineering, does not know how to program, does not speak english, cannot do basic addition without a calculator, but is willing to do several boring lectures regarding the cooperative employment program that nobody else really wants to deal with.

The scope of this could be broadened to include criticism of much more than just university, of course. I have similar complaints about a lot of things in society right now. But I'll leave that for another day.

yrs,
tensix