Does anybody remember the stuff they learned in college?

Do you remember the character Father Guido Sarducci? He was played by Don Novello, a 'hip' priest from the Vatican. Very funny.

Anyway he had this idea called the Five Minute University. Every course was five minutes long, and it taught you what you would remember from a full college course 5 years later. For instance, the Spanish course was 'Como esta usted? Muy bien, gracias'. That was it. That's all you'd remember after 5 years.

But the thing about college is that it exposes you to a lot of stuff. Some 'catches', some doesn't. Things you're interested in, your college learning is just an introduction, a launching pad. You will continue to learn about these things the rest of your life! Sadly, our brains don't allow us to know everything about everything. We learn about stuff we are interested in, and this comes at the cost of forgetting things we weren't interested in (if we ever really understood them to begin with!)

For instance, I was a liberal arts major and I fell in love with certain periods of English literature, but most of the reading I've done was after college! Just last night at a pre-Thanksgiving party, I got into a lively discussion of whether the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to allow citizens to have guns so they could revolt. I explained how I didn't think it did, referring to the Declaration of Independence, its roots in the English Enlightenment, John Locke, etc. Someone asked me how I knew all this stuff and I said 'I went to college!' But really I'd learned most of this stuff (and developed many of my admittedly opinionated views) AFTER college, from reading I've done after I got interested in the subject in college.

I'm not worried. You don't use it everyday, so you lose the specific details that you crammed in there for tests and such. I think the general themes and rules are important, but don't sweat the small stuff.