Yesterday I heard something — a very ordinary bit of info — that neatly summed up the trouble with college. Someone told me about a friend of hers who was a graduate student in English at Berkeley. Her friend taught a small class of freshman and sophomores. He was enthusiastic about what he was teaching, but his students were not. He couldn’t make them enthusiastic, even a little. They just sat there. When I started teaching at Berkeley, I had a similar experience. My first class was introductory psychology. Over the first few months, I came to see that my students, almost all of them, had different interests than me. I thought X and Y were fascinating; they didn’t.
No one is at fault here, of course. It’s perfectly okay that the grad student enthused about something that leaves his students cold. It is perfectly okay that I liked Research X and Y but Research X and Y bored my students. Nothing wrong with any of this — in fact, we need diversity of thought and knowledge, which grows from diversity of interests. We need diversity of thought and knowledge because we have many different problems to solve.
At fault is a system (Berkeley and similar colleges) that fails to value that diversity. (In fact, it doesn’t even notice the diversity, except in a one-dimensional way: how much students resemble their professor.) Even worse, the system tries to reduce diversity of thought because it tries to make students think like their professors. Why should the 20 (or 800) students in one class be forced to learn the same material? The students vary greatly. Forcing all of them to learn the exactly same stuff is like forcing all of them to wear exactly the same clothes. It can be done, especially if rewards and punishments (i.e., grades) are used, but it’s unwise. Just as feeding children a poor diet stunts physical growth, forcing college students to imitate their professors, instead of letting them (or even better, helping them) grow in all directions, stunts intellectual growth.
I wrote about these issues here and gave a related talk about human evolution. Aaron Swartz and I have ideas about a better way, and how to get there, which I will blog about. I will tell a 10-minute story about this as part of the Porchlight story-telling series on March 26 (Monday), 8:00 pm, Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market Street, San Francisco ($12 admission).
Hi Seth,
I couldn’t agree with you more. My degree was in Philosophy and within that my favourite subject was the Philsophy of Mind. I remember studying both Daniel Dennett and John Searle. I enjoyed both immensely, but I agreed with Searle. Unfortunately, my professor was a follower of Dennett and through pride, I suppose, I wanted to get a ‘first’ mark in at least this one subject so in the exam I espoused Dennett’s argument rather than Searle’s. It hurt me to do it, but I got my ‘first’.
Years later, I bumped into Daniel Dennett at a book signing and somehow felt compelled to tell him all this… The poor guy, he must have thought I was an idiot! It just goes to show that I still carry that shame around with me to this day. Heck – here I am confessing all over again.
Something is definitely wrong with the system though, when you know you must agree with your professor to get the desired grades. I always imagined that a Philosophy degree would be about thinking for oneself, but it turns out, it is just as hide bound as everything else.
Great post, Seth – as a college freshman, I must say that I wholeheartedly agree. However, the diversity of teaching styles, doctrines, and course subjects needed to create a new college experience would only be possible through extensive use of the Internet and outsourcing (e.g. off-site Indian TAs/assistants). Unfortunately, universities and the politicians/bureaucracies that control them are loathe to implement these two components – especially the second – into university education.
Until then, I’ll be stuck with a terrible (for me) Business Communcations professor – I only had 2 choices in professors, and only one that fit my schedule. As Ruth pointed out, going against my true beliefs about good business communication habits to get an “A” instead of a “C” does me no good in the long run, and only makes me hate college and business school.
BTW Seth, I ran across this article from 2003 on creatine and number memorization/IQ tests in Australia. Maybe a future self-test? As soon as I save some cash, I plan to try it out.
https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3145223.stm
Thanks, Sean. I didn’t know that about creatine. Yes, maybe a future self-test.