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Adventures in Tab Closing #4
Aug. 11th, 2010 02:01 amHuffington Post: "Sheepskin and the Herd: Why Passive Student Consumption of Higher Ed Is Destroying Critical Thought"
As a current college student, I find myself relating to a lot of the problems brought up in this article, and I happen to agree with its central assertion. Before I could grasp the idea of the liberal arts education as a mean of personal and societal growth, my parents had subtly taught me that the main purpose of college was to get a good (read: well-paying) job, and like anything learned at a young age like that, it's a notion that I still have a hard time playing down. School doesn't help either; that's a place where you learn how to get good grades and pretend that you're intelligent rather than actually thinking critically about anything, and it seems as if most people enter college with those habits, and leave without having those habits challenged in some meaningful way. I know I certainly focus more on "doing all the right things" and getting good grades rather than being responsible for my own intellectual growth, and even though I've been lucky to sit in on conversations among just students that were thought-provoking and educational, those have been the exception rather than the norm. I know I should work to fix this, but I hardly know how (again, a problem of colleges and universities mentioned in the article), and because I only have a year left, I'm not sure what good it would do.
Back in October I read a couple of articles by Mark Edmundson about this very topic, which I wrote about here. While both Edmundson and Bailey talk about the fact that today's students treat a college education and "lite entertainment," I feel Bailey's article is much closer to the truth, as I've had many problems with some of the things Edmundson asserts.
One assertion in Bailey's article I disagree with, however, is the notion that this situation is partly due to the Western literary canon "falling out of fashion" -- because I'm not in the mood right now to explain why right here, I'll instead point to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ojuzu's recent entry about the perhaps undeserved attention given to Shakespeare (and, by extension, the rest of the "Great Books"), and my comments in response to it, and say that they are just a couple of ideas that can lead to an adequate criticism (ojuzu, I hope you don't mind me linking your entry here).
RELATED LINKS:
--New York Times: "Administrative Glut"
--New York Times: "Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age"
( Six more under the cut... )
A more pernicious but subtler threat to an education that produces independent thinkers, I believe, is the prevailing student attitude of passive consumption toward post-secondary learning. Many of the students with whom I had studied were indifferent to their education. They saw good grades and the much-coveted diploma as the ultimate goal, the achievement of which would lead to a job with a salary and benefits.
I believe this attitude stems directly from the pervasive cultural notion, instilled in part by parents and eventually internalized by students, that a higher education is not an opportunity to be earned but rather a product to be consumed. A college education is not seen as a period for intellectual growth but rather it is often considered only as an ends to a specific material means, with the added bonus of enjoying a temporarily carefree and enriching social life.
[...]
Unfortunately, the system is not set up such that this ability to question is automatically instilled just by attending classes and fulfilling course requirements. Professors can encourage critical thought, but in the end, we must actively cultivate the capacity ourselves. During our college years, large amounts of free time coupled with an open learning space rife with educational resources creates the perfect environment in which to become a true self-taught questioner.
As a current college student, I find myself relating to a lot of the problems brought up in this article, and I happen to agree with its central assertion. Before I could grasp the idea of the liberal arts education as a mean of personal and societal growth, my parents had subtly taught me that the main purpose of college was to get a good (read: well-paying) job, and like anything learned at a young age like that, it's a notion that I still have a hard time playing down. School doesn't help either; that's a place where you learn how to get good grades and pretend that you're intelligent rather than actually thinking critically about anything, and it seems as if most people enter college with those habits, and leave without having those habits challenged in some meaningful way. I know I certainly focus more on "doing all the right things" and getting good grades rather than being responsible for my own intellectual growth, and even though I've been lucky to sit in on conversations among just students that were thought-provoking and educational, those have been the exception rather than the norm. I know I should work to fix this, but I hardly know how (again, a problem of colleges and universities mentioned in the article), and because I only have a year left, I'm not sure what good it would do.
Back in October I read a couple of articles by Mark Edmundson about this very topic, which I wrote about here. While both Edmundson and Bailey talk about the fact that today's students treat a college education and "lite entertainment," I feel Bailey's article is much closer to the truth, as I've had many problems with some of the things Edmundson asserts.
One assertion in Bailey's article I disagree with, however, is the notion that this situation is partly due to the Western literary canon "falling out of fashion" -- because I'm not in the mood right now to explain why right here, I'll instead point to
ojuzu's recent entry about the perhaps undeserved attention given to Shakespeare (and, by extension, the rest of the "Great Books"), and my comments in response to it, and say that they are just a couple of ideas that can lead to an adequate criticism (ojuzu, I hope you don't mind me linking your entry here).RELATED LINKS:
--New York Times: "Administrative Glut"
--New York Times: "Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age"
( Six more under the cut... )
