yeah well in my opinion college instills appreciation of the humanities, secularist thinking, and an overall love for education. if someone WHO HAS A DEGREE is gonna bitch about going through these classes, like you are, then at least i know he or she knows how fucked up the overall system really is, not just secondary education requirements themselves. vocational training can be just as bad... you learn a bunch of shit just to get a job somewhere, and end up being completely retrained once youre hired. what's the point?! it's mostly to weed out the stupid people, but at least colleges provide you with these aforementioned gratitudes. you'd see far more shallow thinkers in the world if college ONLY prepared you for what you have to do. if science is supposed to help us progress as a species, then we have to be enlightened enough to understand how to utilize it correctly. look at history and you can clearly see my point i hope
Oh, I certainly agree, the education system is fucked up.
I don't see where it is vitally necessary for me to take classes that are not related to my field to attain a degree in the field that I was going to.
Besides, as you point out, half the time the schools are a generation or two behind current developments in a field, unless they are one of the leading schools in that field. (Which of course probably means they are a Private Ivy League University like Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins (Medicine), or MIT.
It does no good to be trained in out of date technologies, and not have advisors that know what they are talking about when they talk about your field.
I spent 4 years getting an Associates in Comp. Sci. when I should have been trying to get one in Industrial Programming (less crowded field.) (I spent a lot of time taking unnecessary business related courses.)
What's even sadder is that by the time I was done with the prereqs, and the additional non-field related courses was I was sick of school. I didn't go to learn what I already knew (which is what all the of the 100 level course were) I was going to learn what I didn't know. (200 courses and up.)
Sadly, I spent most of my time taking courses at random, because the school didn't have any kind of organization with regards to ensuring that it was actually possible for first year students to take the courses they needed to fill the prereqs. (My conclusion was the only the well off can actually afford to attend college, because some one working doesn't have the ability to deal with the screwed up schedules that college would force upon them.)
The School System is a joke, I don't know if a system where there's a group of teachers that know all the course material and just goes through it for however long it would take to get the degree would be any better, but I think it might have an advantage over the current system of barely organized chaos.