Dave Barry on College
College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time sleeping and trying to get dates. Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
- Things you will need to know in later life (two
hours).
- Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998
hours).
These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things,then 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. It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was in college, I had to memorize, don't ask me why, the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan
and
Crashaw. Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember
something important
like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in
oil or tuna
packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind,
right there
in
the
supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.
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,
or
chemistry, 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 exactly the
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
oak, 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 casual relationship exists between groundward
tropism and
lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." If you
can keep this
up
for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large
government grant.
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