I started my freshman year of college last fall. It scared the crap out of me. It had been 30 years since I’d gone to school, and although I was pretty sure I was fairly smart, I wasn’t sure at all that I’d be able to do well in an academic atmosphere. It was so bad that, for the first month or so, I was having panic attacks in the parking lot, walking to class. Part of it was that I was just afraid I was too old. I knew that I was going to be a great deal older than the other students, but I didn’t realize I was going to be a good bit older than some of the professors. To my surprise, I found that my age actually helped. I was able to make connections between the classes that the kids in the class couldn’t make. It also didn’t hurt that I’d been alive for about 1/3 of the time period covered by my American History class (although that is kind of a double-edged sword).

Obviously, age is not the biggest problem with college. Neither are most of the things that I thought would be a problem. A smoke-free campus is really just an inconvenience, plus I get to feel like a rebel committing an act of civil disobedience while I hide beside my truck to sneak a smoke (that, of course, is on a good day. On a bad day, I feel like a 12-year old, hiding out from mom. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing). Neither are the fears about being too conservative (old?) to deal with the liberal academic bias that I’ve always heard about. I would have to say that there is definitely some liberal bias (although, let’s face it, it’s basically a community college in Indiana. How liberal could it really be?), but not as much as I had feared. Of course, it probably helps that I’m one of the few people I’ve ever known who have become more liberal as they grew older, a trait which I attribute to learning I was so wrong about so many things (I’ve often thought that I should go into Meteorology. I’ve been wrong for free all my life. I’d like to lose my amateur standing and try getting paid for it). It gets harder to condemn others when you’ve proven yourself a foolish jackass as routinely, and publicly,as I have. At the very least, the liberal bias has given me a lot to think about.

And so I come to what, I’ve found, is the biggest problem with college. They actually expect you to think about stuff. It’s really kind of weird. If I remember correctly (and that’s a big if), in high school, they pretty much actively discouraged thinking. Any sign of actual thought process on the part of a student really seemed to worry them. The object of grade school and high school seemed to be pretty birdlike. The teachers would chew the information up into mush and try to barf it directly into our brains, and then we were expected to barf it back up on the test. It wasn’t learning so much as memorizing. College seems to be more like a buffet. The teachers throw it out there, and you’re expected to figure out what to do with it. Half the time, it seems, they don’t even care what you do with it. Take my science class for example. It’s basically “science for English majors”, so it’s pretty basic stuff. Every week, there are chapters in the textbook we’re supposed to read, & on friday, we meet in class for a lecture. We’re coming up on the middle of the semester, and the professor has yet to talk about anything covered in the textbook. On the other hand, he has made me think a lot about sciencey stuff, as well as think about why I have always thought this way about sciencey stuff. Now obviously, the last sentence alone proves that I’m no better at science now than I was in high school, but at least I’m thinking, which is something that I, like most Americans, am extremely uncomfortable with.

We like to give the appearance of thought, we even like to think that we’re thinking, but most of the time it seems apparent, if you really think about it, that we’re not really thinking at all. All most of us are doing is the same thing that we did in high school, barfing back up the same pre-packaged thoughts that have been barfed into our brains by our parents, our churches, our friends, and especially the media. Now I’m not saying that all of the stuff we got from those sources is useless or wrong (especially the stuff we got from our folks, and, to a lesser extent our churches), but I am saying that it could all benefit from some actual thought, especially the stuff we get from the media. Look at the “news” you pay attention to. Is it biased? Of course it is. Does the bias lean toward your own natural inclinations? I’ll bet it does. Now the actual news is pretty much the same across all the channels. You get the same basic information from the 6:00 news whether you watch Fox, MSNBC, CBS, etc. But when we talk about the news, a lot of the time, we find ourselves talking not about the news, but what Bill O’Reilly, or Glenn Beck, or Rachel Maddow, or John Stewart have to say about the news, and how right they are, and how much we agree with them. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I get most of my news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I can’t help it, I like a good laugh with my daily dose of depression. In my defense, however, I will say that I don’t believe everything they say, or even agree with them much of the time. I’m also somewhat embarrassed to admit that frequently Bill O’Reilly says something that strikes a chord with me. What both John Stewart and Bill O’Reilly do is give me stuff to think about, and not just whether I agree or disagree with them, but why I think that way.

So, like I said, I think the biggest problem with college is that they expect you to think. From what I’ve seen, the biggest problem with college students is that they (like most Americans, or people in general, for that matter), is that they don’t want to think. Most of the complaints I’ve heard from other students is that the professors are not telling us exactly what we need to do. We seem to want the professors to just barf facts into our brains so we can memorize them, barf them back up, and get a degree and a career with a Fortune 500 company (or at least a manager’s position at Radio Shack). Of course, judging by all the kids I see looking at the Facebook and shopping online during classes, some of us don’t even want to think that much.

Of course, I may be wrong (it’s happened before). What do you think?