ANDWHY THE WORLD NEEDS ‘B.S.’ DEGREES
The dictionary definition of education is “The process of training and developing the knowledge, mind, character, etc., especially by formal schooling.” In which case, I am unprocessed .
By P.J. O’Rourke
I can’t exactly say I’m not educated... I have a college degree. But it’s in Liberal Arts. What knowledge I possess is not trained and developed. Neither is my mind, my character, and – as best I can tell – my etc... In other words, I don’t know how to do anything. I can’t build a building. I can’t design a rocket. I can’t do math. Really, I can’t do arithmetic beyond the first page of the multiplication tables. I don’t know how much a whole mess of nines is. I can’t cure your ills or drill your teeth or represent you in a court of law when you sue me for medical malpractice. I can’t invest or speculate. (That is, I can’t successfully.) I can’t turn $1 into $1.01 even with the one-year Treasury rate at 2.25%. I can’t fix a flat on your car. It may say “B.A.” on my diploma, but what I’ve got a degree in is “B.S.” (Wait, I can fix it, if you’ll let me roll your car forward a foot or two. Your tire is only flat on one side. I learned that when I took “Physics for Poets.”) I never studied a subject that has been applicable in my adult life except Abnormal Psychology,
and let’s not go into details about that. I was an English major... because I was paging through the course catalogue and I saw “English” and I thought, “Hey, I speak that!” I chose my courses in college according to what time of day the class met, adhering to the rule, “You can’t drink in learning before you drink lunch.” And I graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. I’m ignorant – but I’m good at it. And that’s the enormous advantage of a Liberal Arts education. You can’t spend four (or five or six) years of college picking only courses that you can bluff your way through without learning the art of bamboozling... It may say “B.A.” on my diploma, but what I’ve got a degree in is “B.S.” I can talk the shingles off a barn roof. Or, as the case actually was, I can talk them back on. Yes, I’d be smarter if I had a “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. If I’d studied trigonometry, I would have realized that cutting down a 50-foot pine tree that was 20 feet from my barn might result in certain
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American Consequences 81
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