Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Get Rid of College

A friend of mine who is a podiatrist told me he could teach his entire job in six months. I believe him. A woman I know studying to be a nurse had to drop out – temporarily, she hopes – because she could not pass the algebra course.

Why does a nurse need to know algebra? She doesn’t. Algebra doesn’t exist in real life. Another woman told me years ago she became a nurse in ten months. Now a four-year college degree is expected.

I could go on, so I will. An old girlfriend, who has an MBA in Accounting and Finance, had to take a calculus course twice to pass it. Does she ever use calculus? No. Will she ever? No. So why did she have to take it?

Many college degrees are worthless. Whatever happened to Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter? Now to work on a newspaper a four-year degree is required. I have one. They’re worthless. Everything I leaned I could have learned in six months on a newspaper.

Apparently college degrees are supposed to be filters. What they’re supposed to filter out, I don’t know. It certainly isn’t the worst, considering how many journalists are liberal idiots. As for MBAs, many of them are the publishers of newspapers (how did that happen?) and none of them saw the collapse of the Mainstream Media at the hands of the internet.

I’ve worked for MBAs from Harvard and Yale. They didn’t know what they were doing. It should be as it was in the past – people should start at the bottom and work their way up.

I am amazed at the stupidity (or is it just ignorance?) of so many college graduates. In college I once had to borrow a typewriter (yeah, a typewriter) from a girl I knew, whose father was a Political Science professor.

When I picked the typewriter up from him, he said, “The bomb is armed. Just put it next to Hitler.” I laughed. When I returned the typewriter, I told him, “The bomb went off but Hitler escaped. Now they’re after Rommel.”

His eyebrows shot up to his hairline, and he said, “I’m glad to see that not all of my daughter’s friends are political and historical ignoramuses.” Again I just laughed.

I learned about Rommel being involved in the attempted assassination of Hitler when I was 11 years old. These days, you can get a Ph.D and still never have heard of it.

Is the purpose of college to make people stupid? And of schooling (which certainly isn’t education) in general? Jefferson, Washington and Franklin had almost no “formal” schooling. They did pretty good.

I know a very old man who became a lawyer merely by passing the bar exam. He never took a law class in his life. It should be like that today.

You could close down colleges, get rid of all the degrees, and it would make no difference. Did Andrew Carnegie have a degree? Did Bill Gates? You could dump the MBA completely and the only difference is that things would get better.

If you want to be a doctor or dentist, you should be able to apply to doctor or dentist school without a degree, take the entrance exam, and see if you pass.

School, if anything, cripples many kids. Public school was boring. Even college was boring, although not as badly as what I endured before college.

Degrees don’t mean a damn thing anymore. College doesn’t, either.

1 comment:

Enbrethiliel said...

+JMJ+

You might already know, Bob, that Ray Bradbury never went to college. He calls himself "library educated."

In a recent interview, he said that children should be taught to read, write and do simple maths, and then nothing else. Anything else they might want to learn, they can study on their own later in life. He mentioned his own brother, who taught himself all about electricity and got a job at the Bureau of Power and Light.

Here's the link: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury

He says other great stuff.