My previous post (“Manners”) was a rather optimistic look at the potential benefits of the academic life for students (and faculty). This post is the other side of that coin.
I currently teach a class in which students are asked to learn. I don’t mean that they are asked to memorize material from a textbook. Indeed, much to their protests, there is no textbook for this class. I mean that students are asked to try to find information out for themselves, and to try to figure out problems on their own, never having seen an example worked in a textbook, in the full expectation of mostly failing on both scores. Struggle and failure are the beginning of learning.
We start slow. The first assignment of the class asks them to look up the meanings of a few key statistical terms, in the library. Here is the answer that one student provided:
I don’t have time to go tramping around in the library, looking for books.
Now, in case you don’t know it, university professors just love to share little nuggets like this. My favorite one from my own classes is this:
Galileo was burned to a steak by Cardinal Bellaring.
There’s no denying it: that’s funny. It’s also a little sad — even after correcting the humorous misspelling of the beleaguered Cardinal’s name, and the even more humorous misunderstanding about the nature of this particular capital punishment, it’s a little sad that after something like 12 or more years of school, someone could be so misinformed about a major event in our past, one that continues to color people’s views about the relationship between science and religion.
I do think that there is an ‘age of responsibility’ with respect to ignorance: there comes a time when, at least in some contexts, people are responsible for their own ignorance. But I don’t think that, for the most part, college freshmen are there yet, and certainly not in a context where they are asked to ‘perform’, as on an exam. When I hear a student say something like ‘Galileo was burned to a steak’, I do get a little sad, but I am not angry, and I don’t put the blame on the student. (Where should one put the blame? I suppose that parents and ‘the educational system’ must bear some of the blame, though that it is a different story.)
But what about “I don’t have time for books”? I will be honest and admit that when I heard that one, and after I got done laughing (a kind of bemused, and slightly distressed, laugh), I was angry, and my anger was focused not on ‘the educational system’, but on the student.
Was my anger misplaced? Who is responsible for ‘attitude’? I don’t know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’m going to hold us all responsible for our own attitudes.
I believe that attitude is in fact the biggest problem facing college education today. I’m not exaggerating. Primary and Secondary education faces other problems, perhaps more severe (poorly trained teachers, lack of community support, and so on), but these problems are largely absent from higher education. Our biggest problem is attitude.
My student who won’t go to the library is only an extreme example of what appears to be a very common attitude amongst students, that learning is supposed to be fun, that class-time is about the presentation of information, that homework is about practicing or rewriting (a.k.a. ‘regurgitating’) what was done or said in class, and that it is simply unfair to ask students to do work that they have not already been told how to do.
I hope that I am wrong, but I fear that many of my colleagues have given in to this vision of education — or worse, that they share it themselves. Students regularly complain to me that I don’t put my lecture notes on the web. First of all, I tell them, there are no notes to put on the web. I am teaching this material because I already know it. My notes are reminders to myself about how to teach, not explanations of the material. Second, even if I had such notes, I wouldn’t make them available. I doubt that they would teach anybody much of anything, though they would perhaps make ‘getting a good grade’ somewhat easier, less work.
But learning (as opposed to getting a good grade) is hard work. A nice little book by the biologist (and university professor) Robert Leamnson (Thinking About Teaching and Learning) makes this point well. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but he does nicely describe, from the point of view of neuro-biology, why learning is hard: creating new pathways in the brain is in fact biologically difficult. It requires effort. It literally hurts your head.
But really, we don’t need neuro-biology to tell us why learning is hard. The main point has been well-understood for a long time: the body naturally resists work, and learning is work. The body must be trained to work, and the initial steps of training are painful. It is just hard to break the body’s habit of slothfulness. There’s no way around it.
I don’t mean to suggest that no pleasure can be derived from learning. One can derive great pleasure from a hard job well done: reveling in a beautiful garden that required hours of backbreaking labor to create is sweet, and even sweeter for those who participated in the making of it. So too, one can take pleasure in learning, but it is not the sort of pleasure that one takes in a succulent dinner or a beautiful piece of music. The pleasure that one takes in learning is both different and sweeter, because it includes the enjoyment of the fruits of one’s labor, along with the satisfaction of a job well done.
So what, then, is the diagnosis for a student who can’t be bothered to go to the library for the sake of a little learning? I don’t know, but I wonder whether in fact such a person might suffer from a kind of implicit misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure, a failure to appreciate the sort of pleasure one can dervie from a job well done. It is the sort of failure that certain aspects of our own human nature might even encourage. (I am not, of course, suggesting that ‘it is all about pleasure’. There are many things going on here. But I do suspect that an implicit misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure of the sort descrbed above might be part of what is goin gon.)
Not all hope is lost. By the end of the semester, for the most part, students stop complaining that I am not spoon-feeding them. Maybe they have just grown weary of me; maybe they’ve concluded that I’m a hopeless case. But maybe, just maybe, they’ve also learned a little something.