Hateful Reality

The results are in on the 2006 faculty survey, which asks teachers to comment on the qualities they find most useful in students. Other than "exciting mammalian protruberances," and "makes me feel hip by laughing at my jokes about Seinfeld...do people still watch Seinfeld?" the most popular answer was "has military/law enforcement experience."

This is shameful. There is no group I would rather shit on than soldiers and cops, unless it's Republicans who are soldiers and cops, but Republicans are too chickenshit, in my opinion, to be soldiers, and they are too dumb to go to college on the way to becoming cops. Broad and speculative, not to mention almost certainly incorrect, I know.

But the survey, unfortunately, reveals a truth about higher education: teenagers aren't ready for it. They ought to be out traveling the world, having experiences, or at least working in factories, so they can decide they really, really want to go back to school. Too often my class is full of know-nothing twits who are proud of the fact that they have never left the city, and who are there only because they think everybody needs to go to college and do so right after high school. Sorry, Brit'ny: that's just not true. Flunking out of college is not going to help anybody, and kids who don't want to be in my class will most assuredly fail it.

And perhaps it is for the reason that so very many of the people in college are the indifferent type that the jarheads, skinheads, meatheads, and flatheads stick out.

I am not kidding: ex-military types are not just better students, they are light-years better than everyone else. They do the reading, they speak up in class, they ask questions. They make appointments to discuss papers and exams, they bring original ideas to the meetings, and then they write and revise those ideas to perfection. They are our best students, and it has come to the point where we can spot them in the crowd by virtue of their commitment to learning.

What is this phenomenon? It shames me to think how often I have disparaged these people, and the evidence is so overwhelming that I am not just wrong but that I should really recruit these people to be in my classes.

Is it because they have learned self-discipline in the service? Is it because they don't feel any pressure in a classroom, compared to the demands of the military or law enforcement? One student told me she was sick of being obviously lied to in the Marine Corps and that in college she would make up her own mind about things, now that the Marines had taught her to be skeptical of authority.

Truly amazing. Who would have thought?