I'm attacking my dauntingly long backblog again, applying the delete key ruthlessly on articles that are merely interesting. Whatever the inverse of to decimate is, that's what I've done, killing off nine of every 10, and putting Li'l Writer Guy to work on what remains. Casting the Net—which I'm reviving after a layoff long enough to have taken a baby from conception to the time most obstetricians would insist on induction—will pick up the ones of heightened interest that aren't compelling enough to demand a full post.
The good news? It's getting a lot easier to look good in school: Be on time, dress neatly, look interested, interact with the professor, do the homework—and the professor will love you, if you don't shock him into a heart attack.
Blunting the American Edge Kara Miller, who teaches at Babson College in Massachusetts, reports that, as a rule (there are always exceptions), her foreign students are far more knowledgeable, engaged, and ambitious than her American students.
Chinese undergraduates have consistently impressed me with their work ethic, though I have seen similar habits in students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. ... [T]heir respect for professors—and for knowledge itself—is palpable. The students listen intently to everything I say, whether in class or during office hours, and try to engage in the conversation. Too many 18-year-old Americans, meanwhile, text one another under their desks (certain they are sly enough to go unnoticed), check e-mail, decline to take notes, and appear tired and disengaged.
At their best, American students marry knowledge and innovation, resulting in some astoundingly creative work. But creativity without knowledge—a common phenomenon—is just not enough. Too many American students simply lack the basics. ... We’ve got a knowledge gap, spurred by a work-ethic gap.
It gets worse The pseudonymous John Smith, a 40-something professor at a liberal arts college, is quitting his dream-becoming-nightmare job.
[M]ost of today’s college students, especially those that come to college straight from high school, are unnecessarily coddled. Professors and administrators seek to “nurture” and “engage” and they are doing so at the expense of teaching. The result: a discernable and precipitous decline in the quality of college students. More of them come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous. Instead they perceive college as an overnight recreation center in which they exercise, eat, and in between playing extracurricular sports, they carry books around. ... My students are brutally honest—they tell me with candor and without shame that their peers think of college as a four year cruise without a destination.
No doubt these students deserve some blame for their lethargy, but some culpability lies with their professors, and the administrators who ostensibly but unsuccessfully provide vision and direction. ... Far too many of my colleagues are ... showing up late, popping in videos during class, assigning group projects, or sitting in a circle and asking students how they feel. Why they have abandoned classroom rigor is something that only they can answer. ... [T]hey feed the mindset that all students are exceptional by awarding high grades, honors and special prizes to the intellectually inferior.
Intellectual sparring ... about ideas—among students and faculty—has been replaced by one-sided, partisan drivel (for example, Obama = admirable. McCain = terrible and, for the record, I [voted] for Obama).
I know that I’ll miss the good [students]. Any good professor treasures the joy of seeing in a student’s eyes the “ah-ha—now I get it” moment. It cannot be replicated, nor can it be easily described. It is sadly ever increasingly rare. In fact I think I am doing a genuine service to the better students by leaving. I cannot in good conscience dumb down a lecture, knowing full well that the gifted and talented have read four chapters beyond the syllabus, and that they are not being sufficiently challenged. [emphasis added]
But there's hope Georgetown University professor Patrick Deneen sees much of what Smith sees, and concludes the problem is much more widespread, and deeper, than the classroom.
At the elite institutions where I have taught I don't see so much evidence of the "cruise ship" mentality as much as the "credentialing" rat race. But for that reason, much of the analysis remains valid: the decline of intellectual exchange (among both students and faculty), the absence of leisure reading, the constant anxiety about grades and "gaming the system" to ensure a pristine transcript for the next credentialing stage - all of these aspects of [Smith's] essay ring true to me.
What [Smith doesn't spend any time considering are the cultural conditions that led to this pass. ... Arguably one of the key and essential features of the liberal arts education was the transmission of cultural restraint: how to govern our appetites, how to achieve the liberty of self-rule, how to pass from that condition of childhood to adulthood. ... [Smith] laments the decline of the college because of what no longer happens in the classroom. If that is the last bastion of what is supposed to be worthwhile about the role of the college in transmitting and reinforcing good culture, then the battle was already lost long before [he] entered the professoriate. I find myself at times viewing the wreckage with similar temptations to hopelessness: but then I encounter students and faculty who understand the scope of the destruction and in the wreckage try to build something new and better. Renewing a culture is almost impossible, but it begins not with despair, but with chastened hope, a small community of those who understand, and a willingness to show by example a better way. [emphasis added]
