by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

In a few weeks youths will be sent back to worship the usual collections of intellectual greatness, but this year I suggest students - and indeed everybody else - scrutinize the track record of the alleged geniuses presented. The sky is littered with overrated historical characters, and here are some of my choices.

René Descartes This frail little introvert would never roll out of bed before 11 and then he'd sit in an oven and write stuff like, "Water which has been kept on a fire for some time freezes more quickly than otherwise," something he could easily have disproved had he actually got his ass out of bed in time for the breakfast specials. He was right to preach critical thinking as in, "Is that red apple really red?" but "I think therefore I am" remains one premise short of an argument, and besides, consciousness - as we know from watching The Matrix - could be a dream.

Oswald Spengler Another lint-covered antisocial bookworm too fragile to do heavy lifting, Oz was blessed with a cool name and penned the catchily titled Decline of the West, which between its many factual errors attempted to predict WWI after it ended. I always picture Hitler stroking his moustache while reading this by candlelight in the Bavarian hills.

Albert Einstein Fluke artist! The customs clerk could barely talk and happened to daydream about stars and planets. He lucked into a big theory which he milked the rest of his life and then convinced FDR to exploit for nuclear weapons; an all-too unconvincing legacy to justify those repulsive and ubiquitous posters of him sticking his tongue out.

Dante Catholic church clerics were the medieval photocopying machine. If something was religiously incorrect it didn't get passed on. So when this Florentine schizophrenic dreamt up a map of the nine circles of hell (one Dante-inspired online survey suggests I'm headed towards the 6th among "three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents"), it was favoured because it terrorized Italians into piety. Unfortunately it also helped make them the most downcast population of any sunny country.

Hunter S. Thompson "Wow, I'm stoned and nutty and I revolutionized journalism! Woot! Woot!"

James Joyce Many rate three of this Irishman's novels among the top four novels of all time. Hemingway and Fitzgerald would walk to Gertrude Stein's to score cocaine and they'd spot Joyce wandering around Paris and say, "Oooh." But the fact is, Ulysses remains a triumph of mediocrity, the literary equivalent of the '70s virtuoso guitar solo prevailing over '60s song craftsmanship. I've read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man repeatedly and still can't remember what it was about.

Oliver Cromwell Now, I'm for regicide as much as the next guy, but not if you're going to replace the king with a biblical Taliban so constipated that they're going to cancel Christmas. This guy believed Englishmen should live strictly according to the Bible, a poor choice compared to countless other possible models, such as The Reader's Digest Guide to Home Repairs. Cromwell's revolution ended absurdly as his crew descended into Monty-Pythonesque bickering about proper religious customs.

Molière I've watched about 60 plays over the last few years and indeed slept through 20 more. None can induce a deeper slumber than the chronically overrated Molière.

Jane Jacobs Jane made some good points. Yes, grannies looking off balconies can lower crime in a neighbourhood, and so forth. But the way every urban studies student gets glassy eyed at the mention of her name gets a bit tiresome, plus she chose to live in Toronto, of all cities.

Stephen Hawking Sold millions of books. Now he admits his black hole theory was totally wrong. Fire up the talking machine: "SO-RR-EEE N-O-O REEE-EE-FUNDS!"

Malcolm X X's parents moved from St-Henri to the States, where he was born and acquired the troubling suspicion that his real father was a red-haired white guy, so X overcompensated by preaching paranoia. From chauvinism, nationalism, jingoism, tribalism to Parti Québécoisism, philosophies that encourage division have never helped advance the world.

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