There are bound to be a lot of different opinions about a person being awarded a Master’s degree in Ninja Studies, and plenty of folks are probably already laughing and wondering what this individual could possibly do with such a degree. From a practical standpoint there doesn’t appear to be a lot, but given that the program teaches basic survival skills, martial arts, and the history of the ninja it’s likely that it might be good as a history degree and could possibly teach people a thing or two. But thinking as to how it might be applied is, as a lot of people might see it, not really as valuable as the money that likely went into it. In other words, the money spent is bound to be worth more than the piece of paper that will announce the completion of the program. But the skills learned are priceless, even if they could have been learned without spending the kind of money that went into this program. This is one major problem with college, and it comes from the desire to have a university acknowledge and announce that one is skilled in whatever course they’ve selected, no matter that it’s bound to cost them a great deal of money for the piece of paper that states that they have in fact understood the lessons and are now skilled in whatever course they decided to take.
The difference between a degree meaning anything and being just an expensive piece of paper is the application of the skills that one gains during this time since like it or not, anyone can pass a course and earn a degree in something they’re passionate about, and there are plenty of schools that offer up degrees that are entirely nonsensical to some folks. People can major in the culinary arts, which isn’t nonsensical until one realizes that raw talent and a great deal of experience often trumps someone that’s just come out of culinary school. There are majors for puppetry, astrobiology, and for many other impressive-sounding fields that can help a person earn a degree and are in some ways helping to make a college degree just a little bit more worthless by the year. The application of these degrees is what makes the difference between their being useless and weird, but in many cases, those degrees that are earned for performing very niche areas of study aren’t all that high-paying and require a lot more work in the real world, away from school, while practical degrees that demand that a student work while they’re in school tend to create a greater demand for a student’s services and can help them to pay off any debt once they’re all done with their schooling. Without trying to offend anyone from a cultural standpoint, the way of the ninja is very interesting, but it doesn’t sound as practical from an educational standpoint.
It’s easy to argue that the skills this individual learned would help him quite a bit and that they might already be helping him, but the fact is that this course isn’t designed to teach a person how to become a ninja, but how to understand them and how to learn basic survival skills that those that followed the way of the ninja used way back in the day. Sorry to spoil anyone’s hopes, but the class is basically a jumped up hybrid that combines survival and history, without teaching one how to scale a building or throw a shuriken. There are so many arguments over what the ninja did back in the day that one might grow confused trying to sort it all out since everyone from casual bloggers that have watched Deadliest Warrior on Spike TV to educated historians will tell you whatever they feel that you need to hear in order to make their case for who and what the ninja were and what they represented. There are accounts that the ninja originated in China with hints of Tibetan and Indian fighting techniques and there are tales that the samurai were known to become ninja from time to time as well. Some would say that ninjas came from the peasant class while others might say that they originated from the warrior class. It’s enough to make a person’s head spin when experts, both real and fabricated, attempt to tell their own version of what went on in those furious days.
The funniest thing is that many of them go by the writing that was handed down from said times and tend to treat what they read as gospel when the simple fact is that anyone can write anything, and it can be easily disputed by another individual that will claim something entirely different from another perspective. A degree in Ninja Studies sounds interesting, but broken down to its basic components it’s a history lesson with a bit of specialized physical education thrown in.
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