Friday, January 28, 2011

Is this degree worth two years of your life?

While driving to work today, I heard a news story that made me wonder. It was the story of Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy, a Canandian woman who is the first graduate from a graduate program in studying the Beatles.  Don’t believe me? Read about it here.  We’re not talking about a semester class on a rock group, but an actual college major!

So, I got to thinking of what kind of career a person with an MA in “Beatleology” might pursue.  All I could come up with was museum curator or college prof teaching more young people useless info.  I mean, all the problems in the world today and this woman (she’s my age!) wasted two years studying a rock group?  And people wonder why the world is in such a mess!

I am reminded of an A. W. Tozer sermon about:

... a certain British peer who had died just a few days short of his eighty-ninth birthday.
Having been a man of means and position, it had presumably not been necessary for him to work for a living like the rest of us, so at the time of his death he had had about seventy adult years in which he was free to do whatever he wanted to do, to pursue any calling he wished or to work at anything he felt worthy of his considerable abilities.

And what had he chosen to do? Well, according to the story, he had "devoted his life to trying to breed the perfect spotted mouse."

Read the whole sermon.  You’ll see that Ms. Zahalan-Kennedy is not the first to study something useless.

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