A chick-flick I recently watched, the title of which will not be mentioned for reasons of preserving my masculinity, took place in the 1950s and forwarded a feminist critique of society from the standpoint of university education. The main character, a professor who taught at a women’s liberal arts college, was frustrated that the brightest women in the United States saw the university exclusively as a means to an end — a temporary distraction from the ultimate goal of becoming a mother and homemaker. By the end of their education, these women weren’t inspired to become the world’s next leaders, scholars, poets, or artists — they were inspired to become their wives. The college of yesterday was nothing but a finishing school masquerading as a university.
Fast-forward 70 years — how much has our conception of education changed? Do the discussions in our classrooms inspire the next leaders, or do they encourage the trite imitation of them? Do our teaching methods stimulate creativity and innovation, or do they produce students who, so practiced in the art of memorization, repetition, and regurgitation, have lost their capacity for creation? Does our model of education encourage the pursuit of knowledge and the beauty of understanding, or does it reduce knowledge to packets of information so abbreviated and simplified as to be indistinguishable from trivia? Are our universities beacons of knowledge and social progress, or are they merely printing presses — finishing schools in which the highest honor is a piece of paper, embellished with an inscrutable Latin phrase, bearing the symbolic affirmation of self-worth necessary to be a “fully-qualified” human being?
It is no coincidence that our modern system of education curiously bares resemblance to an assembly line — the symbol of the Industrial Revolution which not only gave birth to our modern paradigm of education but has simultaneously infected it with the notion that efficiency and conformity are the ultimate hallmarks of progress.
Today, our classrooms remain possessed by an Industrial mentality which succeeds in polluting the very intellectual environment that promises growth. Our educational paradigm is perverted by the absurd notion that the quality of education should reflect the speed at which it’s delivered; that feverishly copying bullet points delivered in rapid succession through a PowerPoint is the best way to excite people about learning; that one’s academic achievement can and should be reduced to a few meaninglessly inflated numbers on a transcript; that the optimal classroom reflects a division of labor regulated by time and place and based on rigid desks placed in evenly spaced rows, geometrically arranged such that the acoustics and visual assembly discourages individual participation; that the only type of learning that matters is that which can be recorded, dictated, and confirmed by an accredited educational institution; that a single score imparted by the LSAT, MCAT, or GRE, can immediately determine whether one’s academic experience ‘mattered’; and that the ‘departmentalization’ of knowledge, like workers in an assembly line, is efficient and therefore optimal.
We are products placed on an educational assembly line at age five and are forced through the system in batches with other students who share our date of manufacture. If you are defective, you’re discarded — an efficient system, after all, cannot tolerate eccentricity. Can your reptilian brain not handle the 24-hour stimulation afforded by iPhones, laptops, television screens, and PowerPoint projections? We’ll call it A.D.D. and put you on Ritalin. You’ll never have to daydream, never have to imagine, never have to think. You’ll be better for it, liberated from the specter of distraction, emancipated from the inconvenience of being human, and you’ll be free to absorb that which your told and be like the rest of us.
It doesn’t matter that at each step in the process we are given another feature, another lesson that makes us feel special, because in the end, when we finally graduate from the system, we’ll all be the same — learned for the tests, taught from the book, and educated for the promise of money.
Our universities, self-proclaimed "institutions of higher learning," are accurate only insofar that one defines “learning” by the number of inflated “As” received in standardized curriculum, and the number of obligatory classes one selects and passes from convenient degree "check-sheets." Our counselors encourage us, however, to take a class or two for fun — college is about intellectual growth, after all, and how can we ever grow if we take the same classes, with the same students, from the same teachers, in the same disciplines we have favored since we were children?
So if we’re really interested in a subject, we should feel free to spend $2,000 per class, delay graduation and add even more to the insurmountable debt we have already incurred to live the American dream. We could, of course, learn the subject for free through countless internet resources — we could skip college altogether, actually, and have an Ivy League education from the convenience of our bed. We could perform the same jobs with the same degree of skill as the most accomplished of Ivy League students, but none of it will matter if we don’t have our name inscribed on a single piece of paper sponsored by a university.
We work for half of our lives to receive a certificate that confirms our self-worth. And we’ll work the other half of our lives regretting what could have been.
When I arrived on this campus my freshman year, I assumed that the “college experience” was synonymous with intellectual stimulation and growth. I found to my dismay, however, that people were far more interested in discussing OU football, celebrities and the half-remembered anecdotes from last night’s parties instead of the state of our political system, our economic policies or anything else that actually required having read books. I found myself so regularly feigning interest in their stories that I lost interest in creating my own.
I came to grasp the reality that the majority of my classmates were nothing like me — they come to class with hangovers, refused to participate in discussion, pleaded to be let our early at every opportunity and saw class as a distraction from more important social activities. I frequently overhear students ridicule others who ask questions in class and thus postpone its conclusion. Every day I hear self-congratulatory stories about how someone “BS-ed” their entire essay based on Wikipedia abstracts and managed a passing grade. And I begrudgingly listen to students bragging to others about their success in class despite “never having picked up the textbook.” I often wonder how many half-curious students, longing for the promise of stimulation, have resigned themselves to a mediocre intellectual experience because of this environment. What exactly is the purpose of a university that fails the only students that actually want to learn?
I overheard some people saying that Thursday is the new Friday. How long will it take before Wednesday becomes the new Thursday? How long will it take before the entire week becomes a five-day social binge interspersed with the occasioned inconvenience of education?
This is literally the only time in our lives where we will have the opportunity to communicate with experts in every field and have our opinions shaped by more than just headlines and chain-mails. This is the only time in our lives where we can sample from every subject at our leisure, have our questions answered by professors who are paid to do so, and become more than just characters in somebody’s memory of last-night’s antics. But we’re wasting the only time we’ll ever have. We’re wasting it destroying the brain cells that would have never been used anyway because our generation has come to believe that the “college experience” means anything but intellectual growth.
I think a university education should be measured in part by the degree to which its students are able to be connected with others who share similar interests, passions and ambitions. A great professor of mine often states that real education doesn’t happen in classrooms — it happens in the dorms and dining halls, in places far removed from the traditional education setting. As I reflect on my own education, I find that the memories I value most are those which have nothing to do with school curriculum. It’s the reading clubs, the current event discussions, the conversations over a game of chess — it’s these memories that have cultivated my passions and motivated my academic interests. A university that fails to acknowledge this fact or a professor that privileges the teachings of his or her own class over these extra-curricular activities misses the entire point of education.
There are two ways in which education can work: it can either liberate its students by encouraging a model of education that facilitates skepticism, curiosity, activism and debate, or it can instrumentalize its participants, forcing integration into a system laden with the biases and prejudices of the status quo. Which do you think we have?
The first method describes the very purpose of education — to stimulate a latent curiosity that will direct a life dedicated towards intellectual satiation. Education divorced from social activism and change and presented in a way that discourages debate is pointless to me. It encourages the banal transmission of facts and trivia without the concomitant knowledge of how those facts can promote personal and social growth. It encourages a paradigm much like our own, where curiosity is sedated by a curriculum that asks all the questions for you; where bullet points put periods at the end of thoughts; and where an easy class is a good one.
The second method, the one that hits close to come, works by devaluing the role that the student plays in the creation of his or her own education. It naively presumes a monolithic conception of knowledge in which teachers are the sole arbiters and authorities over which information is deemed “valuable," and that the purpose of the student is to passively absorb all that the teacher has to say, silently obeying a curriculum that masquerades as neutral, but is nevertheless jaundiced by the politics of education. It presumes that being a specialist is more important than being a generalist and, as a result, produces students who are unaware of the process as a whole, and even more frightening, are ignorant as to how to change it. But above all, this method encourages conformity and regularization — teaching from the same books, to the same tests, by the same guidelines, for fatigued students who drag themselves to class every morning to spend the day sitting. Where is the creativity, the novelty, the passion?
A book by George Land and Beth Jarman reported on longitudinal research done on divergent thinking, a concept that addresses the capacity to think analogically and relationally about various concepts. Tests would ask questions such as “how many uses can you find for a paperclip?” or “for which purposes could you use a brick?” According to the research, divergent thinking, a necessary condition for creativity, was expressed at the genius level for 98 percent of Kindergarten students. Five years later, the same students were tested at the ages of 8 to 10, and only 32 percent scored at the genius level. By the time they were adults, only 2 percent of individuals were considered "geniuses" at divergent thinking. Why?
This is the consequence of teaching students that intelligence lies in conformity; that a vocational education is more important than a liberalizing one; that teaching the formulas and the answers is better than the proof; and that creativity is a relic of the past — for the Renaissance men who would be idiots according to today’s metrics of specialization and standardized tests. This is the consequence of our educational system. Our public schools are producing a public that cannot think for themselves, but boast an array of letters after their name suggesting that they can.
Creativity can be taught, it can be practiced in classrooms, and it can be institutionalized as an essential part of our curriculum, yet the United States isn’t even making an attempt. Music courses usually take place at the very end or beginning of the day to maximize focus on “real” math and science education. Required art courses in college focus on information, not practice. We stop playing with Legos and building blocks as children, despite the fact that such toys have been shown to stimulate lateral thinking, improve creativity and positively predict science and math skills. We stop permitting recess at Middle School, the exact time when students need it most. And we have little-to-no courses that teach creativity or even posit it as a goal of the course.
European countries have already done these things. According to the book, “The Flight of the Creative Class,” eight of the top 10 most “creative” countries are European. Even in the United States, the most successful and innovative corporations have all been started by immigrants — Google, Intel, Sun Microsystems, eBa, and Yahoo, to name a few. Uncoincidentally, the innovative companies that were founded by Americans — Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Dell, YouTube and even the Ford Motor Company — were all started by college dropouts who found school un-stimulating and felt they didn’t need a degree to tell them how successful they could be. The statistics demonstrate a worrying trend: more start-up companies in Silicon Valley are started by immigrants than native citizens; 40 percent of U.S. technology patents go to foreign nationals; and a decreasing amount of migrants are attracted to U.S. colleges, which they perceive as stagnating in quality. What happened to our educational leadership? Where has our creativity gone? What happened to the country that landed on the moon in seven years with less computing power than a present-day cell phone?
I don’t claim to know the solutions, but I do know that they won’t be found by clinging to an antiquated system of standardized tests and uniform curriculum. It won’t be found by preserving a model that treats students as workers and education as a commodity. It won’t be found by privileging math and science at the expense of art and music. It won’t be found by encouraging memorization over creation. And it won’t be found through insights gleaned from the depths of a factory.
Curiosity killed the cat, but it’s what gives us life. It infuses our sensibilities with purpose and ignites the flame of learning. Without curiosity, there is only obedience. Without creativity, there is only trivia. Without activism, there is only imitation. We must encourage a model of education that is based in these tenets or brace for a future in which the attention-deficit, mentally exhausted, disempowered students of today are tomorrow’s leaders. Personally, I’d prefer the cat’s fate.
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academon 1 year, 6 months ago
Beautifully written. Easily one of the best op-eds that I've read in a long time.
jbob 1 year, 6 months ago
RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms by theRSAorg
hey look I can copy Sir Ken Robinson's lecture too. I feel you need to give him credit. I am no expert in plagiarism, but this seems dangerously close.
TheJR 1 year, 6 months ago
Really liked this.
sniferriple 1 year, 6 months ago
University has become something that American youth are expected to do. It's become easier to pay for college, and saving up for it is something parents and students are expected to start doing quite early on. There's a stigma attached to not going to college; students who decide to get a job right away or don't see themselves benefiting from life in academia are seen as unmotivated, or unintelligent, or lacking ambition. But I know plenty of college students who could be described the same way, and they fill up gen-ed classes and bog down seminars with apathy and uninspired discussion.
I've also had some terrific discussion-based classes here, though, where students email around articles related to the seminar outside of class and find themselves still arguing twenty minutes after class is supposed to have ended. I've had professors willing to sit and talk to me or put me in touch with experts in the fields I'm interested in, who are willing to go off on interesting tangents and use the textbook to supplement, rather than to drive, the discussion. There is damn good education here and in the university system, should one seek it out.
It is a sad state of things, though, when an interested student has to go searching for learning in a place where it should be omnipresent. It's sad when the above style of learning is only offered to a small group, because it's already assumed that the majority isn't interested.
In short: Absolutely terrific article. Thought-provoking, well-written, and so relevant.
evandefilippis 1 year, 6 months ago
@Jbob-- you think Sir Robinson was the first to make the metaphor relating school to industry? He borrowed it from countless people before him. The metaphor has been around for as long as the assmembly line, and I wrote a column sophomore year, before that lecture, that made an identical argument. Excepting one fact about divergent thinking, rephrasing it, and contextualizing it within a original, enormously lengthy column, doesn't even come close to constituting plagiarism.
philosophymajor 1 year, 6 months ago
Amazing column. I've found that, at least in Oklahoma, it takes about 2-3 years before you find a group that can facilitate regular intellectual discussion. It definitely should not take that long.
And disregard jbob, he obviously hasn't done any reading on academic philosophy or education if he think Sir Robinson came up with any of the ideas that he lectures about. You wrote an awesome essay, keep it up.
Alejandro 1 year, 6 months ago
The author is a hypocrite. I personally know him and he has engaged in the same type of activities that he criticizes his classmates that are "nothing like him" do.
"I frequently overhear students ridicule others who ask questions in class and thus postpone its conclusion." He has called my questions stupid.
"Every day I hear self-congratulatory stories about how someone “BS-ed” their entire essay based on Wikipedia abstracts and managed a passing grade." He was bragging that it only took him hours before a 10 page essay due to complete it and get an A. It took me three days to just write my essay and a week of research.
"And I begrudgingly listen to students bragging to others about their success in class despite “never having picked up the textbook.”" He has done it, our last test he told me before class he didn't even read the two books necessary for the test.
While I appreciate the quality of the article, I think its dishonest and hypocritical for an author to criticize other students for doing stuff that the author himself does.
fartstink 1 year, 6 months ago
turns out, "alejandro," thats not the point. Point is, don't be jealous because someone did better than you in class OR (capital OR) (not Oregon) did better than you on a standardized test. TURNS OUT, you can still do well in uh... the real life..... without DOING WELL IN SCHOOL OR ON A TEST. not new information.
I think the point of the article, is to inform people that systematic schooling often denies youngsters of creativity. Not that hard to follow.
Don't cry if your tears shed jealousy,
Assblast.
scholar 1 year, 5 months ago
Brilliant post. Beautifully worded and completely accurate, of course. As a former engineering student, I cannot tell you how much my creativity was stunted by classes which stressed menial book work and theory over practice and innovation. It wasn't until I got out into the real world that I was able to develop the creative skills that I should have been working on my entire life.