Man, I hate college. The bureacracy, the inefficiency, the obssession with (arbitrary) legitimacy. But I especially dislike that they don’t teach me what I really want to learn. Or rather, that they force me to slog through subjects and issues I don’t care about (and have no use for) to get to the few things I’m actually interested in hearing lectures about. An entire semester of 20th Century Literature, and what did I get out of it? Mostly that white people should feel guilty. Oh, and a loathing for authors that can’t get to the point. Taking advantage of other cultures just because they’re handicapped by technology, language, and/or their system of organization is wrong — I get that. But is it really so imperative that I be fed that lesson over and over again through different metaphors and perspectives?

That whole course was wasted time to me. Okay, maybe ten years from now someone will say something witty about Toni Morrison and I’ll be able to laugh politely. Yeah, that was really worth a thousand pages of boring crap and forty dull lectures.

I wish I could just hire private tutors, ordinary people even — not career professors, to teach me about subjects I’m interested in. I bet that’s what aristocrats did in the days before universities. Way better system, if you ask me. The only drawback is that resumés would be a lot longer. Instead of “Bachelor of Arts in Humanities,” you’d have to write “Taught personally by Dave of Spokane in the ways of chemistry and South American history. Received tutelage from Alberto of Topeka on writing short fiction and sonnets…” etc. I think that’d be way more interesting though. In some ways, I dislike what standardization has done to modern education.

Anyway, if you’re wondering what prompted this little homily, I finally got around to registering for summer classes. This involved climbing way too many flights of stairs on my gimpy ankle. About that: My parents offered to pay for me to see a sports medicine doctor here, but I don’t want to go if it’s at all avoidable. The last two doctors I went to were either crazy or incompetent. One, an “allergist” (I say that contemptuously, but he actually had a license), turned out to be one of these healing-power-of-crystals types — thought he could cure people with a back massager; the other, a UW Medicine guy in Seattle, misdiagnosed my strep throat (which led to me suffering through it for more than a month) and charged me $600 to find out that my cholesterol was “okay.” Hopefully this goes some way to explaining my reluctance to help another quack swindle my mom and dad.

One of my summer classes has already started; I have to get over to to the CUE building tomorrow at 10:30 AM. The others start in June and July.

Have you seen Akon’s Mr. Lonely music video? It’s actually pretty good. I guess I’m like two years late on this, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

My sister left for the Tri-Cities today. This is the last summer she’s spending back at home. She bought me and Brett pizza before she took off — that was pretty nice of her.

Once again, I’ll conclude with some 4chan goodness. See you tomorrow.

Update: I was talking about my education argument with Brett and I thought of a better way to summarize my opinions: Education should be a free market system designed to serve the student as a consumer. If the traditions and subsidies and attached regulations were thrown out the window, I think we’d see efficient, highly customizable methods of instruction spring up. People would learn more faster and be more satisfied with the experience. Too bad it’d require some kind of massive revolution or radical changes in law to be successful on a wide scale.

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