The last test I took in high school was an AP Macroeconomics final. It was a multiple choice test, and the answer to the last question was C. Given the supposed popularity of that answer in random samples, it seemed fitting. The funny part is that I couldn’t tell you what the question was, or what any of the questions were for that matter, if my life depended on it. Somewhere, deep the recesses of my mind, a general knowledge of Keynesian economics resides, but the specifics have long since vanished.
My undergraduate career ends Monday. Had I known it was going to be so easy I would have tried harder in the beginning, but all of that is dead, gone and soon to be forgotten. What matters is that in just a few days the university will hand me a piece of paper that proves that I know something, however tertiary and insignificant, about political science. It’s all a big lie, of course. Marx and Locke and Aristotle and all the others float around in my head just out of reach and far too insubstantial to grasp. I have all these ideas, all these theories, but they refuse to coalesce into anything meaningful. All these years and, you know, I don’t really know anything at all.
In high school my teachers assured me that in college I would really get to apply what I was learning. Now, professors are claiming the same about graduate school. I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think I’ve been sold a substandard bill of goods, but at least it’s finally over and I’ll be able to move onto bigger and better things. Hopefully.
Completely. Why is it that, at every stage in life, everyone is saying how the next stage is more important. Are we just dogs at the dog track chasing a rabbit?
Left by Adam on July 24th, 2003