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You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd

My first official day of unemployment (though I've no notion of actually going on the dole) was well-spent out at my father-in-law's place, readying bits of the garden to do the job of feeding us, as it did so well this last winter. We have learned that one cannot can too many tomatoes, that we don't really use the jalapenos we froze (or at least as many as we kept), and that we actually did use all that okra. One particular publicist seems always to call when I'm out there, checking on one record or another, and to her delight the rooster went off right on cue.

All of which is to say I was pretty tired when I walked in to campus to give my apparently annual guest lecture to a library class that is, I think, meant to be about media and how we take in information. Over the years, I suspect because I've been in proximity to one kind of celebrity or another, I have been asked to speak to classes at Middle Tennessee State, at William & Mary, and here in town at Morehead State. As the adult child of an academic, it's a painless way to revisit my decision not to pursue higher education, if nothing else.

Now, Morehead State isn't the toniest university in Kentucky. A lot of the 10,000 some kids who attend each year are the first from their family to go to college, and some of them don't make it. On the other hand, they put an extraordinary number of students into medical school, and the music department is first-rate. A number of my friends around town teach in one department or another, and my theory about education remains that you get out of it what you put into it as a student. Which I finally figured out my senior year of college. Better late than not.

Anyhow...at three different universities over six or eight years I've had the same reaction from students: bland obedience. They don't ask anything more than the most obvious and obviously polite questions. They don't challenge anything one might say, and I'm fairly confident that several of my listeners today didn't appreciate for a moment the political digression which preceded my suggestion that our society presently doesn't value knowledge and expertise. But they didn't say a word. Not a bloody word.

Now...maybe I'm an intimidating presence. Maybe. And it's true that nobody taking this class intends to work hard at it; that's not the purpose of the class, which is taught each year by one of a rotating crew of reference librarians who have somehow been dragooned into teaching because it's a state university on a budget. One of whom, the one I know, my friend up the street, is leaving here for Middle Tennessee State, as it happens. The class is meant to be easy, a break, and every smart student's schedule is filled with at least one such class each year.

But in the old days, when I was in school, we questioned authority. By reflex. At the end of each quarter my senior year, when I knew who I was and where I was going, and it wasn't to graduate school, and it wasn't to law school (albeit I never did finish the wretched novel, but that's not just at this moment the point), I wrote a summary paper in at least one class arguing that the professor was fundamentally wrong about something. I remember particularly arguing that "The Rape of the Lock" was written in an awkward, adolescent phase of the development of the English language, and some other stuff (which I still believe, I guess). I got As anyhow.

But my experience, and my discussions with professors here and elsewhere, suggests our students today are somehow wired differently. They don't question. They absorb like hard earth taking on rain, retaining just enough of the water of knowledge to get whatever grade they're motivated to try for, and they move on. Their passport to the next life task duly stamped. The notion of learning for the sake of knowing seems utterly lost. The Socratic method is, apparently, an artifact of another time. Challenging authority...nah, why bother? Get along, graduate, move on.

I guess.

Of course I have a theory. We keep trying to quantify education. We have standardized tests to prove that we are (or are not) teaching our children all the things they need to know. And in order to succeed as a teacher or a student, your attention must be focused on pleasing the test-writers.

This is going to be a problem.

We need to teach our children -- this society -- to think. To value thinking. To explore ideas, not simply to take the advertised wisdom of Taco Bell as the gospel. To remember that the written word is not the inviolable truth, but the product of flawed human beings trying to come to the truth. And on, and on.

Tests measure only the skill at taking tests, and the ability of everybody involved to master an array of dumb human tricks. We need to teach thinking, and the active quest for knowledge.

Look where it's gotten me!

Posted by grant on April 8, 2008 8:33 PM | Permalink

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