College, a holiday post

Looking through my inbox at my Google alerts for pedagogy, I often come upon wonderful, uplifting pieces like this one on creative pedagogy. The goal is expressed as lighting “a fire and a passion for learning” in our students.

I’m going to go all Grinch and Ebenezer on this idea, in the spirit of the season. Those who’ve read my blog for a long time will understand that I do believe in inspiring students with my own modeling and trying a multiplicity of cool learning activities, but that I also face reality squarely.

So much literature on pedagogy the last decade has promoted the idea of opening curriculum to allow students to pursue their own interests. I do this, of course, when I have students choose their own topics for posting weekly evidence and writing papers. But the push goes beyond what I do, to allow students to determine their own direction for all their work. In my class, then, those who are fascinated by World War II could study only that the entire term, or pursue only the history of skateboarding, or trace only their own interests and determine their own reading.

This approach is bolstered by those trying to correct the presumably “industrial” model of teaching. Haunted by straight rows of desks and raised hands, reformers want to create a more open environment for discovery. This view manifests in the disdain of lecture, the promotion of active learning, and the idea of the teacher being “the guide on the side” or (even better) discovering together with students.

We flip classrooms, we engage in social equity pedagogy, we bring in amazing things, we guide discovery. Sometimes students respond with enthusiasm, but when we get down to those exams, they do the same or worse than students did when we used the “old” method. So the utopians say, “the exams are bad! down with exams!” But most of us have to assign a grade, and even more we feel an obligation to assign this grade to the work produced. Not to enthusiasm. Or participation. Or the socio-economic status of the student. And when the exams come back and we see that we’ve failed, we cannot admit it and just raise all the grades.

Another approach is more like marketing: give the customer what they want. This method focuses on what students say they want in class: an enthusiastic teacher, more study guides, fewer large-stake assignments, inspiration to become involved. Student evaluations complain: “he won’t tell us what’s on the test”, “he docked me 3 points for being late”, “I have eight classes and three children to take care of, and this class assigned too much work”, “she’s boring”.

What no one wants to talk about is that what many students really want is college as adult day care. They want class to be like a fancy retirement community, where the teacher tries really hard but they can choose to participate in the fun activities or just knit in the corner. They also want to be reminded continually of anything they’re expected to do, as I’ve seen over two decades of student demands that the LMS tell them when everything is due. In this model, it is easy for students consider themselves as guests, not the inmates of an industrial penitentiary (as assumed by reformers) nor participating contributors. They wish to be entertained into being interested, and individually counseled into being motivated, assuming they need bring neither of these to the table.

I’ve been researching 19th century education, which was not as “industrial” as we like to think, and where teachers were just as concerned about pedagogy as we are. But they saw college differently from my colleagues. It was a place where talented scholars deserved to go, and where those who weren’t scholastic were naturally excluded. The meritocracy (a term coined by Michael Young in 1958) was designed to be real, including those who had scholastic talent but would otherwise be socially excluded due to their background, race, income, or class. Victorian educational reformers wanted the examinations to be open to all comers, even before the University of London did so a hundred years before Young named the system. The idea was that the degree was awarded on ability, and ability alone to the extent possible. Those without money would be paid for. Status, gender, race would be ignored. It was a given that scholastic achievement was not for everyone. The methods used would be those that worked for talented people to pass the examinations and earn a degree.

The goals, designed to promote opportunity for those whom society left out, have evolved into something entirely different. Now we believe that college is something everyone ought to be able to attend, regardless of scholastic merit, and more, that they should be able to get a degree. I struggle to find reasons why we want people to attend college who don’t want to be there, and are not interested in the development of the mind, only the goal of a degree with its presumed connection to a good job and a nicer living than others have access to.

The scholarly diamonds in the rough are worthy of all the care, attention, and sound pedagogy we can offer. Those who struggle because their life circumstances make things difficult deserve even more — they deserve a public-funded system that understands that it’s in the public interest to help them. Even if their skills aren’t there yet when they come to us, it is our task to help them develop. At community college, sometimes we need to feed them — literally, so that they can think.

The unmotivated, the lazy, the ones who only want to study World War II, the students who want young adult day care? My sympathy and care with them is bounded by the attention they give to the work I assign, the work designed to help them develop historical skills. If I inspire them, it will be because they want to be inspired, not because I’m particularly inspirational.

I wanted to end this post with a critique of the Yeats’ quotation that began the uplifting article I linked at the top, about education being the lighting of a fire rather than the filling of a pail. But I can’t, because it looks like it isn’t even Yeats. I refuse to go all post-modern and say that doesn’t matter, since it’s the idea that counts. It does matter, and is yet another argument for a good, rather than an easy, education.

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