School is a waste of time

VAUGHN TURNBULL
Opinions Writer

I’m in my last year of university at the U of S and I have slowly become closer and closer to dropping out. Is it because I’m a lazy deadbeat? Maybe, but there’s a little more to it than that. 

I went into university with great expectations. I was an honour-roll student four years straight in high school and was excited at the amazing learning experience of college. But my three years at the U of S have proven to be nothing but disappointing. What I was expecting was enlightened professors with amazing insight and knowledge, interesting classes and fun experiences. I didn’t get any of these.

Professors

“Those who can’t do, teach.” This is a joke I heard a few years ago but it’s no joke at the U of S. Most professors have been in university since age 18 and have never actually gone into the “real world” they so often reference. If you were successful in your field, you would be out making lots of money at it instead of teaching moody young adults. We are being taught for the most part by people who are real world failures, not the ideal people to be instructed by, in my opinion. 

Some professors have had jobs outside of teaching, but with these individuals, one must ask why they are now teaching if they could succeed in real life. Perhaps they tried and failed after a while, or maybe they just wanted the easy $100,000 a year with a nice pension. They are either quitters or lazy — shining examples for impressionable young minds.

One issue with some (but not all) professors is arrogance. The attitude of commander-in-chief that some professors have is laughable. It’s even more fun when they have the “What do you know? You’re just a kid,” approach to students. We pay their salaries and they are condescending in return. Smashing.

My favourite is if you question a prof’s statement or disagree with something they are saying. You better not bring it up in front of the class because that could hurt their feelings, which in turn will hurt your marks for the rest of the term. Oh, they’ll deny that to the death, but it’s true; profs need their egos stroked or their world comes crashing down faster than a house of cards in a hurricane. 

Textbooks

 
95 per cent of textbooks suck. It’s not a secret. Either they’re using data from the ’80s or it seems like they were written by someone who has never had any social interaction before. There’s also the fact that they are boring; there’s way too much information just for the sake of filling pages. I guess the longer the book is, the more they can charge for it.

My favourite part of textbooks is the new edition each year with the chapter order switched around or three new pages added on. But the edition from the year before is obsolete, so don’t even think about using it. And forget about trying to sell your old texts to students, because they need the most current information to ensure a good learning experience. Ha!

Textbooks are either written by some knob from the States (or sometimes the U.K. — how exotic!) or they’re done by U of S professors. When you have a class that has a text written by the prof teaching the class, suddenly buying the text is a matter of utter importance. Cha-ching! Royalty cheque rolling in.

The texts are terrible but, despite this, probably half of the professors in the school teach directly from the text. Why am I going to class if you’re just going to regurgitate the text to me in verbal form? Because I am a good little worker bee and I do as I’m told? Or I hope to get something besides a boring read for my $600 class? Too bad I just get a book read to me in monotone. It’s like getting Microsoft Narrator to speak a textbook with some dull PowerPoint slides to boot. 

Money

I’m paying $6,000 a year for classes, a few hundred for “services” and around $1,000 for books per year. Scam! We’re getting rung drier than a ShamWow on an infomercial. For rezzies and others from out of town or living on their own you can add the cost of food (or meal plans) and housing onto the whole bundle as well. Students need to work full time year round to cover these costs. A lot of us can’t though, so we rack up student loans (which won’t be easy to pay off with a history degree. Sorry, it’s true).

Once you pay all this cash for a nice piece of paper and some letters after your name you get a nice, high-paying job, right?

With a lot of degrees obtained at the U of S, you may as well have invested your tuition money in Enron. With the money we spend here they should have a job lined up for us upon exit, but we just get a kick in the pants and begin a long, difficult job hunt. 

Think about what you’re paying for each class. In Term 2 there are approximately 24 lectures per course. With the course costing approximately $600 and the text at, oh say $100, that’s nearly $30 per class. For about an hour long lecture, is it really worth the money? For 30 bucks you could go see two movies at Galaxy and even get snacks for each! Even if one of the movies sucks, you’re still getting more entertainment value than a prof reading some PowerPoint slides.

Oh, sure, sure, but school isn’t about entertainment. It’s about learning and education. Let’s not lie to ourselves; there’s not much of that going on. So if we aren’t learning we should at least be entertained. And as fun as it is watching documentaries when the prof is too lazy to give a lecture; it’s just not worth the moolah. 

Social life

Remember all those epic college parties in the movies? Lies! Granted these were hyped up, Hollywood versions of college, they are way more fun than real school parties. There are a few parties hosted by various groups within the university, but basically all of them are either a fundraiser for some stupid student club or just a gathering of a ton of students in a situation no different than a bar.

Take LB5Q for instance: Pay us $10 so you can take a bus to a field on a cold September night and pay $5 a drink and have mediocre local bands play while you get muddy and cold and wet (not in a good way). Oh, and add three thousand loud, rowdy drunks to bump into you, spill their drinks on you and throw up in your general vicinity; sounds like a stupendous time.

Keep in mind that I’m not an elitist; I don’t want a wine and cheese art gallery event, but the parties that go on are pretty weak. Sure, they allow beer gardens to be set up for the first week of school in the bowl, but that just nets them a wad of cash from overpriced beer sales and, let’s face it, they need something to con us into not leaving right then and there.

Social life should be a fundamental part of the college experience. At the U of S it usually consists of lame massive parties or fundraisers, house parties (just like high school!) and bonding in common areas like the Reading Room where we can complain about our shitty profs, assignments and classes. Move aside Animal House, party over here! 

So why do we do it? Nothing better to do, I suppose. I think a lot of students have an idealized view of university and how they’ll get their nice jobs after graduating and be set. Wake up. Lawyers, doctors, accountants and other professionals might have a nice career path ahead of them, but most graduates can expect a flashy starting salary below $40,000. I wish you luck buying a house outside the ghetto with that minimal chunk of change.

And those aforementioned professionals can probably look forward to a repetitive job for a big corporation with the light of retirement at the end of the tunnel. Secondary education creates cookie cutter people who haven’t learned much and wasted time and money only to have a boring career until retirement or death. If that is what all the U of S recruitment advertisements said, there might be fewer applicants.

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Sheaf contributor Alex Ferwerda has written a response to this article. It was printed in the Jan. 14 issue of the Sheaf and can be viewed HERE.