SMOOTH AND HARMONIOUS LEARNING COMMUNITIES

 

 

 

Rudy Takala
October 22, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

The 2005 school year officially began this past September. For younger children, that means receiving explanations from teachers about how you shouldn’t copy from other people’s papers because they might be wrong. For those of us who have realized that isn’t a problem if you only copy from smart people, it means receiving four to six years of feeble explanations about why ethics are a good thing.

This fall, I’m taking twenty-one credits from a nearby community college. For the most part, the season’s been going pretty smoothly; the college has only changed one policy on account of me. Two weeks after classes began, the school psychologist called to ask if I was feeling “overwhelmed.” Evidently, not many people take more than twenty credits of classes in a semester. The new policy is that students can no longer take more than nineteen without petitioning.

It’s easy to see why you wouldn’t want to if you’ve spent enough time in the classes. On the first day of accounting, we received a handout about creating “Smooth and Harmonious Learning Communities.” Along with it were guidelines for respect and ethical behavior. Maybe if my ethics course hadn’t taught that ethical issues were all subjective and that there was no such thing as a right answer, the school wouldn’t have to spend the rest of its courses teaching that right and wrong do exist when it’s convenient.

On the first day of my history class, the teacher claimed that Americans “preach democracy but practice capitalism.” A few days later when he was talking about feudalism, the teacher interrupted himself to ask, “Doesn’t that sound like the situation in Afghanistan today?” Answering his own question, he replied, “It sure as hell does!” After all, Afghans are serfs to the American military.

Then there’s my literature class, where we’ve been reading lots of contemporary literature. The one book we’ll read for the semester is about a pregnant teenage girl; the rest of the time we’ll be reading short stories about, for instance, what someone else termed “horny pills.”

The teacher’s not entirely bad, though. On the first day of class, he took twenty minutes to talk about the syllabus, referred to the required material concerning plagiarizing and ethics as “bulls*** community college information,” and let us out early.

Then I have an economics class, where the teacher recently digressed from teaching about economics and, because we came across the definition of “monopoly” in the book, decided to use it as an excuse to crusade for greater regulation over the media. He read excerpts from an article that advocated for “democracy” by “re-regulating radio” and “prohibiting same-market ownership of more than one type of medium (newspaper, television, radio).” Apparently, “big news” has squelched my ability to be heard.

Sometimes, I wonder what the point is of making teachers go to college. Regardless of whatever it is they’re supposed to do, they’re going to talk about whatever they feel like talking about. And it’s generally not going to be worth hearing.

Teachers aside, I’ve noticed another phenomenon that has been constant in my college experience. There are vastly more females around than there are males. By my estimates, the total number of women in my six classes numbers about seventy, while the total number of men doesn’t quite reach twenty. It’d be less disturbing if at least 10% of the men didn’t appear to be having sexual identity crises, but even that seems to be asking too much.

My observations were confirmed by a recent study reported in USA Today, which found that, currently, “135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men,” a gap that will “widen in the coming years, according to… the U.S. Department of Education.”

The solution, according to Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Tech Central Station, should be to apply “Affirmative action for male candidates, re-education for faculty, campus ‘men's centers’ to match the womens’ [sic] centers that were created when women were an underrepresented group on campus… and efforts to make curricula, dormitories, and recruiting more male-friendly.”

But of course, that isn’t going to happen. No one cares about white heterosexual males.

Hopefully, though, attending college serves a purpose. I’m not learning much, but I’ve been told there’s a reason for going. There are a lot of ignorant, politically disengaged students here, but there’s a television available for them to watch action movies on, and that helps to keep them all in the same corner. The local high school should consider implementing a similar system. I could go on, but for now, I need to go find the similarities between two stories promoting female empowerment.

© 2005 Rudy Takala - All Rights Reserved