Yesterday on BART I saw someone reading The And of Poverty. It was an illegal Chinese edition of The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. I asked the person reading it what she thought of it. “Very ethnocentric,” she said. “Very Jeffrey-Sachs-centric,” I said. (For a good critique, see The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly.) America is not the only ethnocentric country, she said, so are other countries who give foreign aid, such as Japan. “What gives me hope is the growth of micro-finance,” she said. “People have a great capacity for figuring out what they need.” I agreed.
In the comments on my “ For Whom Do Colleges Exist?” post someone asked what I would suggest. In my opinion, almost all attempts to improve colleges have had the same core problem as almost all foreign aid: The helpers think they know better what to do than the people they wish to help.
My prescription for higher education is simple: Give students more control of what they learn. When I did this in spades — more by accident than design — my students blossomed. I had never seen anything like it. It happened again and again. When I helped my students learn what they wanted to learn, as opposed to what I thought they should learn, they learned much more. Funny, huh?
Giving students more control of what they learn can be done in many ways, of course. At UC Berkeley, where I teach, here are two possible baby steps in that direction:
1. There exists a system of student-organized-and-run classes called DeCal. Allow one DeCal class to go toward satisfying the Letters and Science college-wide breadth requirement (seven classes, one from each of several areas). The DeCal class would replace any of the seven classes.
2. Allow — or, even better, encourage — admitted students to take a gap year, as they do in England. A gap year is a year away from school between high school and college. (I proposed such a thing a few years ago to the previous UC Berkeley chancellor. My suggestion was given to an administrator who dismissed it. Too hard to administer, she said.)
Professors should like these suggestions. The DeCal proposal will reduce the number of students who take a class because they are forced to. The gap-year proposal will reduce the immaturity of freshmen. When I gave my students much more power to learn what they wanted to learn, my job got much easier. Funny, huh?