TeenTimes/Kevin O'Connor: As I sit in the dark and dusty lecture hall, listening to the lecturer drone on about statistical analysis and other such useless nonsense, I look around the room at the 50 or so faces, straining to listen to the bored lecturer, their ears cocked and pens scribbling nervously in the hope of hearing those fateful words: "This will be on the exam.
Aside from wondering where the other 350 or so students who should be here are, I wonder who's smarter - myself, who fell out of bed at five minutes to noon and rushed in here to have my spirit crushed and my imagination raped, or the students who aren't here, the ones
who stayed in bed past the magic midday mark and can download a copy of these very lecture notes from the department's website and still pass the exam without ever having seen the lecturer's dusty face?
I look around at the four walls, covered in micro graffiti, words of wisdom passed on in pen from past students, who are now probably doing the same to their lonely office cubicle's drywall barrier that separates them from the robot with a pulse next door.
"I sat here and failed classical philosophy - 1976," says one of the mini blurbs inscribed into the wood.
"So did I - 2002," the message below it reads.
I get up from my seat quietly so as not to disturb the others, and climb the 50 or so steps to the back of the hall and as I look back on the hundreds of empty seats, I wonder again; am I better off?
With my iPod and laptop, with my instant access, on demand, always on, information 24/7, spell-checks, free fees, mocha latte and reality TV?
Or were the people who passed through these very doors 20 or 30 years ago better off, having to read volume upon volume of Marx, Plato and Shakespeare?
Perhaps I have it too soft; I have to read only a small booklet with extracts from these works in it and I get told which bits are on the exam.
These past students - some of whom are now TDs, Ministers, poets and writers - when they left this fine establishment, could be sure that the sacred parchment they held in their hands, a degree, was the key to all they wanted to achieve in life. Now any idiot who is capable of spelling their name properly on the CAO form is capable of getting into college.
When they get there, they won't find what students of 10 years ago found, that is to say, an environment of debate and ideas that spark the imagination and feed the soul. No, what they will find is an education on how to do well in an exam, how to get by and how to use the internet.
"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty." Do you know who said that? Mark Twain. Do you know how I know? Because I'm a second-year English student and should know? No, because I looked it up on the internet.
Kevin O'Connor (19) is a second-year arts student at NUI Galway
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