The summer is winding down. Fall semester looms ominously on the horizon. There is basically one month until classes resume and the studying of many a topic you really have no interest in controls your free time.

That outlook holds true for many college students. It doesn’t matter what major they are in, there are large chunks of college courses that students absolutely abhor because they do not want to learn certain things.

With that in mind, I ask this question: Why do we have to study topics we have no interest in?

The first answer I have heard is that students need a well-rounded education.

In an ideal world, perhaps. But we live in America; land of the kinda free and home to those who aren’t minority members associated with crime or terrorism.

What I’m getting at is that adults not in college and those who didn’t go tend not to have a well-rounded education. Even of those that have gone to college, many learned just enough to get by in those subjects they had no interest in and forgot it when they finished the class.

Some folks will be optimists and say that a great deal of Americans do know and understand a variety of topics. But really ask yourself if you believe that or if you just want to believe it.

The next answer I’ve heard is that the students need these base skills in order to be competitive players when they enter the “real” world.

This answer is even more poppycock. Employers have no idea what you did or did not study in college except from whatever blanket major is on your degree. Employers can only guess that you retained the knowledge from the general education that they might have had.

And those skills that give students a leg-up in the job market, those courses students didn’t want to take but suffered through, who decided these were the right courses to give students a leg up?

Shouldn’t that basic knowledge have been imparted in the latter half of grade school? I remember learning calculus and statistics in high school. I remember learning basic chemistry and physics. I remember being required to sit through the agonizingly boring hours of those and saying to myself, “Well, I’m glad to have learned some of this, but I have no interest in them and cannot wait until college when I get to study just things I am interested in.” OK, fine, I didn’t say exactly that but you get the idea.

It was grade school where we were supposed to get the well-rounded education. That’s why children have to go to school: to get exposure to the basics and figure out what they are good at.

College shouldn’t be making up for the fact that grade school is a joke in this country. College shouldn’t have to back-peddle and try to re-teach the subjects and topics that are supposed to be learned in high school. If students cannot hack it in the class, then they can just retake it or quit.

Some focuses in college require the understanding of certain topics, or so I’m told. But I say with all sincerity that I have taken some of those courses that required me to have a knowledge of math, and that I did not have that knowledge and did not relearn any of that math in those courses.

What I did was show up and do the work as best I could and then asked professors and other students for help when I didn’t understand. I thank those people for assisting me, but I got by with B’s and C’s and even A’s and still had no understanding of the math. I still don’t.

Am I an exception to the rule, or is it that I did what many students do and just toughed it out? Either way, the courses were unnecessary. They took up my time and ate a chunk of my semesters I could have spent taking another course in my field of study.

I don’t think college is what it should be; for that matter, I don’t think grade school education is either. It’s far worse, actually, and becoming more so.

Right now, there is no remedy. Students are being churned out of grade school and wandering into college at a time when degrees are encouraged but don’t guarantee jobs.

If we are to become better educated, if we are to spend thousands of dollars we don’t have in order to learn a trade, shouldn’t we get to learn those skills and not have to trudge through those topics we don’t care for?

Maybe I just believe trade schools are a better path nowadays. Who knows?I have two degrees so far, and I still don’t know near enough about what I am studying to understand how to function in the “real” world in my hypothetical career. That’s why I’m in graduate school now.

What I know is change needs to occur both in college and drastically in grade school. If only education were something those wacky politicians really cared about, rather than just the ocassion for their empty rhetoric, maybe I wouldn’t feel the need to write these drawn-out ramblings. Maybe I would already be a “productive” member of society, rather than having spent a decade in college.