By the time you finished your sentence, I forgot how it started

In these days of sound bytes, it seems that most people, when they're engaged in conversation, tend to try expressing their opinions not with properly thought-out logical reasoning, but rather in the form of extremely short summations of their arguments. While it does offer the side effect of providing most people with more time in which they can watch reality TV, it doesn't bode well for the development of any sort of discourse among Americans. This is no truer than on a college campus.

People don't take classes to learn. They take classes to afford them the opportunity to repeat statistics they've heard on Oprah, and more importantly, to gain a captive audience at whom they may direct their incoherent ideas. I can't tell you how many times I've been sitting in a class, studiously taking notes, and generally minding my own business when one of my classmates interrupts the professor in order to speak aloud such magnificent insights as "When it comes to communication, I think the packaging is important," "You have to think about the movies kids watch nowadays," and "Our perceived needs have increased." All three of these nonsensical "assertions" have one thing in common: They are all based not only on the world views of the people who said them, but on the assumption that everyone listening shares that same world view.

People who think about what they're going to say more than nine seconds in advance are becoming fewer and farther between. Substance has been replaced with alliteration, and complexity with ambiguity. Instead of rationally thinking through one's reason for saying anything, many people simply assume that because they're speaking, what they're saying is at least cursorily valid or important. Not so. The fact that something is said out loud doesn't automatically make it worth listening to. (Refer to anything ever said by a student in a class involving intercultural communication for proof.)

People ask questions in class because they want to hear themselves talk, plain and simple. If that weren't the case, they wouldn't raise their hands, ask if they may ask a question, and then proceed to tell a long, rambling, Abraham-Simpsonesque story that in no way includes a question. That happened in three of my classes last semester. Three. I don't know when universities stopped teaching students who were there for the purpose of learning and started validating students' own half-formed opinions (the seeds of which were planted by such bastions of higher education as Disney films and the MTV Video Music Awards) concerning recycling, vegetarianism, and smoking bans, but it happened so gradually no one noticed.