This was ok, I guess, since I'm probably far too lazy to be an astronomer, but I have one huge problem with the degree I DID get.
I'm not sure what the hell I learned.
Seriously, I wonder if this is the case for a good many people with a diploma with the "Bachelor of Arts" or "Bachelor of Science" title beneath their names. Sometimes my friends will assume since I was a political science major, I ought to know a damn thing about politics--but to be honest, everything I know about politics now comes from NPR. I should have just been handed a diploma after listening to NPR for four years and I probably would have gotten more out of it.
Anyway, this is a pretty disconcerting thought to me. I guess I feel bad now for being deliberately obtuse in my classes, treating them like I did my various assignments in high school (man, did ANYONE read A Tale of Two Cities when the Sparknotes were free on the internets for our perusal?).
The first political science class I had we were supposed to read Mein Kampf, and I seriously developed a contempt for the entire learning process at that point since I think it's pretty obvious assigning that detritus to be read meant my professor's brain was made of swiss cheese. I guess it's not my place to make class reading assignments, but I guess at the time I felt like Mein Kampf is something you read ABOUT and not something you actually read. I also kinda felt like ordering it on Amazon would put me on some sort of government watch list. I think the only part I read was Hitler's emo weeping about wanting to be an artist and I was just done with it at that point.
We had about five or six other books to read of better quality, but it doesn't take a lot to get me to dig in my heels, so I read one paragraph summaries of ALL OF THEM online. This was in the days before Wikipedia and Sparknotes so they all came off of people's shady Geocities sites with half marquee text. I probably had to chase "Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself." across the screen with my eyeballs while trying not to have a seizure from the blink tags.
I had to write a paper on Das Capital. No, I didn't read it, except for one line that was like "capitalism turns lifetime into a worktime," and I was like, damn it's true lifetime is like a work time, but since Marx said it if I repeat it people will want to chase after me with pitchforks and I do not want my spongy flesh to be riddled with pitchfork holes.
On the final, I had to write an essay about frickin' Mein Kampf. Which I had read one paragraph about on a Geocities site, as aforementioned. Probably a site like "Don's Pirate Trove of Nazi Awesomeness." I don't know.
And then I got an A-.
Seriously, this did not prod me into reading anything in any of my classes after that. It got to the point where I had no idea why I bothered spending money on text books that could be better spent on beer and boxed wine. I even switched schools because all of my classes were like that and I wanted to commit seppuku.
At the next school I went to I do think I learned more, and I did have to at least skim parts of the texts to pass classes. I have compiled this list of everything I've learned that hasn't been burned from my neurons by Kirkland vodka.
Things I know about the subject I have a degree in
1. Thomas L. Friedman sucks and no one should ever read anything he writes, ever.
2. Samuel P. Huntington sucks and has the insight of an 8 year old playing with G.I. Joes
3. Francis Fukuyama sucks too but I kinda feel sorry for him being total epic fail
4. Eastern Europe has had hard times after the fall of communism and stuff
5. You know when you're a little kid and you make up hypothetical situations to your parents, siblings and friends that are really absurd and could never happen but you want to know anyway? Some people still did that as adults except they called it Game Theory and I forgot what it's about except that it wasn't worth remembering.
6. Iraq is a hot mess
7. Thomas Jefferson said something cool about atheists not picking his pockets or breaking his legs
8. Andrew Jackson was kind of a psycho
9. Martin Van Buren was Andrew Jackson's boyfriend and we can blame him for this mess of a two party political system, and they didn't even bother to leave any presidential yaoi behind. Jerks.
10. Machiavelli's The Prince is a totally short, sweet read.
11. Aristotle thought slaves were cool as long as they were retarded
12. Socrates and Glaucon probably engaged in some really not hot yaoi since Socrates was like 100 years old and looked like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, I think
13. If Socrates ever came to the future in a time machine every philosophy and political science professor in the U.S. would immediately offer their rectums to him for his use
14. For some reason college professors think you need to read the Federalist Papers EVERY QUARTER
15. The federalist president Adams totally pulled a dick move before Thomas Jefferson's presidency with the whole Midnight Justices Act thing, but luckily Justice Marshall took the opportunity to incorrectly interpret a statute in order to create the whole foundation of judicial review as we know it. Great beginning there, I know.
16. There's like, three branches of government or something
17. If I ever have to read anything written by John Locke again I will vomit
18. St. Thomas Aquinas's arguments could be refuted by a 10 year old
19. If I draw too many pictures of penises during class my ink will run out too fast
20. If you're ever president and die in a month, poli sci (and history, I assume) students are the only people who will know about you in the future.
21. Pufendorf has a funny name but I still don't want to read his crap
22. Hobbes is one of those dudes who constantly talked about god in his writings but everyone thinks he was an atheist anyway.
23. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
24. Maps become outdated really fast since the former Yugoslavia et. al. undergoes mitosis and divides once every couple of years.
25. Rousseau was right. We should all go back to the forest and never do any of this book learning crap.
I guess I learned more than that but I'm bored of itemizing it. Yes most of that was hyperbolic and I remember more detail about that stuff.
I guess bachelor's degrees aren't really meant to give you an expertise in any subject. They're just meant to make it easier to get $10 - $12 an hour office jobs in the hopes that one day you will climb that corporate ladder from one soul-sucking job to another until you reach the top and realize you wasted your life and kill the pain by snorting blow off of hookers.
Woo that seems like a good point to end this.
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