It didn’t take long for Poirier’s provocative sallies to become professional observance. By the 1980s, the rebellious, anti-Establishment posture of young adults had become the creed of America’s educational institutions. These days, rarely does a tenth-grade English teacher say to a class, “If you don’t read Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Austen, you will be an incomplete person and lead an incomplete life.” In 1959, political philosopher Leo Strauss defined liberal education as “the counter-poison to mass culture.” A history professor who agrees with this view today becomes a fuddy-duddy in his own department. Adolescence claimed a distinct mindset and moral position, and enlightened, hip mentors echoed the call. Nobody liked the tags
reactionary, conservative,
or
dinosaur,
and for teachers charged with grading and disciplining students, and thus vulnerable to the charge of authoritarianism, indulgence of youth became an effective way to parry them. One could hardly imagine a more adult-oriented publication than the
New York Review of Books,
and its contributors reside in the most eminent institutions. Listen to one of its regulars, though, Anthony Grafton, professor of history at Princeton, describing the activities of American college kids.
Undergraduates do all sorts of things at universities. They play computer games, they eat pizza, they go to parties, they have sex, they work out, and they amuse each other by their pretensions. What most fiction has ignored is that a lot of them also spend vast amounts of time alone, attacking the kinds of intellectual problems that can easily swallow lifetimes. In the perilous months of their last years at good colleges and universities, seniors parachute into mathematical puzzles, sociological aporiae, and historical mysteries that have baffled professionals. With the help—and sometimes the hindrance—of their teachers, but chiefly relying on their own wits and those of their close friends, they attack Big Questions, Big Books, and Big Problems.
Observe the aside on teachers “hindering” the students, and the hint of novelists who “ignore” their better habits, along with the observation of almost-graduates tackling problems that have “baffled” adult experts for decades and longer. Indeed, the objects of their searches are momentous enough to merit capital letters. College seniors, Grafton attests, pursue questions and puzzles that “swallow lifetimes,” even though their final months on campus are “perilous.” The teachers help, sometimes, but usually students consult “their own wits,” and the input of their “close friends” matters more than in-class lectures.
The summary draws a remarkable picture of undergraduate life, and the fact that it comes from an accomplished historian, not a minor instructor who likes to hang out with the kids, underscores the distortion. The rhetoric overreaches. How many college kids pick up Big Books and Big Questions? According to Grafton, “a lot of them,” but in truth that figure falls way down into minuscule portions of young Americans, even among those at better institutions. Grafton notices some of his charges engaged in high-flown inquiries (a few Princeton students, cream of the cream) and he makes a trend out of it—a pure case of Ivy League insularity. On top of the exaggeration, too, he piles a dreamy bombast. Grafton doesn’t just say that his students learn the remote details of history. They probe history’s “mysteries. ” They don’t just pore over math puzzles. They “parachute” into them. The gap between fact and verbiage widens, the rhetorical space filled precisely by the indulgence of youth. A description so elevated, so melodramatic, aims more for affect than information. The phenomenon Grafton portrays is a lot rarer than he says, but no matter. The attitude it requires, the tender regard for youth, is, one assumes, no less apt. It’s an injunction, so ready and fitting that an exacting and erudite historian/intellectual, writing in a hard-edged Manhattan biweekly, goes soft when talking of 20-year-olds.
The sentimentality justifies mentors in downgrading their mentoring task. They can’t produce much solid evidence of youth brilliance and drive, and so they resort to lofty and flushed language to make the case. “Young adults are fiercely individualistic. . . .They are still incredibly open to new ideas and they want to dabble and experiment. ” So enthuses a report from the Advertising Council (with funding from MTV and the Pew Research Center), though providing little evidence of the good of their “dabbling.” The
Philadelphia Inquirer
’s columnist Jane Eisner acknowledges the embarrassing voting rates of 18- to 29-year-olds, but shifts the issue: “Only if we address the structural reasons that young people don’t vote can we begin to count on them to infuse our democracy with the ideas and idealism for which young Americans have always been prized” (Sept 2004). “Always been prized” for their “ideas and idealism”? Since 1965, perhaps, but not before.
Young people pick up these rationalizations and run with them. For a study of news consumption entitled
Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News
(2005), journalist David Mindich interviewed hundreds of young adults who told him that “the political process is both morally bankrupt and completely insulated from public pressure,” a sentiment whose truth is doubtful—how do
they
know?—but that saves them the trouble of civic action. In a 1999 survey by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism ("Y Vote 2000: Politics of a New Generation”), 69 percent of 15- to 24-year-olds concurred with the statement “Our generation has an important voice, but no one seems to hear it.” The cliché is so hollow it could rank with the statement “Our generation has sexual desires, but no one satisfies them,” but it has acquired a seriousness that 50 years ago would have been inconceivable. It is normal for young people, temporarily, to act disaffected and feel unheard, but for the mentors to turn this condition into an injustice is to downgrade their position, with youths only too eager to play along. No matter how benevolent the rhetoric of the mentors, though, the thing it bestows—intellectual independence—does the majority of youths no favors. And this isn’t only because most youths aren’t ready to exercise it wisely, to their long-term benefit. It’s also because, while the indulgence emancipates the young mind, it sends an implicit and far-reaching message, too, one the kids handily discern. It sabotages something that may, perhaps, be more fragile than the transmission of knowledge from old to young, namely, the simple, sturdy conviction that knowledge itself is worth receiving, the conviction that traditions remote from their daily circumstances have any bearing.
When teachers stand before the young and assure them of the integrity and autonomy of what adolescents think and say and write, teachers expect the young to respond affirmatively, to seek out knowledge and truth on their own. And maybe that works for the upper-crust students, those contending zealously for a place at Yale or an internship on the Hill. But beyond that talented tenth or twentieth student, something different happens. All of them expect the mentors to enter the room with credentialed authority, some know-how that justifies their position, even if some of the kids begrudge and reject it. When the mentors disavow their authority, when they let their discipline slacken, when they, in the language of the educators, slide from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side,” the kids wonder what goes. They don’t consider the equalizing instructor a caring liberator, and they aren’t motivated to learn on their own. They draw another, immobilizing lesson. If mentors are so keen to recant their expertise, why should students strain to acquire it themselves?
The opposite of what the indulgers intend sets in. Knowledge and tradition are emptied of authority. Ronald Reagan once declared, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” but a more elemental rule may be, “Knowledge is never more than one generation away from oblivion.” If the guardians of tradition claim that the young, though ignorant, have a special perspective on the past, or if teachers prize the impulses of tenth-graders more than the thoughts of the wise and the works of the masters, learning loses its point. The thread of intellectual inheritance snaps. The young man from Boston who announces with pride that he cares nothing about Rembrandt and Picasso typifies the outcome. His disregard follows from the mentors’ disregard, their own infidelity to tradition, and the transfer affects all students more or less, the best and brightest as well as the dropouts. The indulgers assume that their approval will bring teachers and students closer together, throwing students further into academic inquiry, inspiring them to learn and study, but the evidence shows that this does not happen.
One pertinent measure of the trend appears as an item on the
National Survey of Student Engagement
(NSSE), the national survey cited in chapters one and two. The question tallies how many first-year and senior undergraduates “Discussed ideas from your readings or classes with faculty members outside of class.” The activity goes beyond course requirements, the tests and papers, and thus charts how many students are inspired by lectures and homework to confer with the instructor on their own. The numbers are disappointing. In 2003, fully 40 percent of the first-year respondents “Never” exchanged a word with a teacher beyond the classroom. Seniors that year displayed more engagement—only 25 percent responded “Never”—although that is still too high a figure after three years of coursework. Normally, as students proceed, they pursue more specialization in a major and form shared interests and career concerns with teachers. Nevertheless, one quarter of all seniors ignore their professors outside the classroom. Worse, three years later, both ranks increased their disengagement. In 2006, first-year students raised the “Never talk to my teacher” rate to 43 percent, and seniors to 28 percent. More students tune their professors out once the hour is up, and the engagement score gap between seniors and freshmen still stands at only 15 points—a sign that the curriculum hasn’t improved.
Notwithstanding the disengagement numbers, however, researchers summarizing the 2003 NSSE survey commend precisely the pedagogical methods of the indulgers. The report observes,
One of the pleasant surprises from the first few years of NSSE findings was the substantial number of students engaged in various forms of active and collaborative learning activities. This shift from passive, instructor-dominated pedagogy to active, learner-centered activities promises to have desirable effects on learning.
A nice prediction, but wholly without support. As “instructor domination” dwindles, as “learner-centered” classrooms multiply, then students should feel empowered to hunt down their profs at other times and places. But while “active, learner-centered” pedagogies have proliferated, more student-teacher contact hasn’t happened, as subsequent NSSE reports show. In a “passive” mode, with an authoritative teacher before them, students may feel more secure and encouraged to consult one-on-one. Once “activated” by power-sharing profs, though, students head elsewhere. A paradox may have set in: the more equal and accessible the teachers, the less accessed they are by the students. Nonetheless, NSSE researchers buy the “learner-centered” assumption. They assert that youth-approving teaching strategies “take students to deeper levels of understanding and meaning, ” but if deeper understanding entails closer engagement with instructors, their own data don’t correlate with the theory.
The researchers could find other noncorrelations elsewhere, too. For instance,
Your First College Year,
a survey of first-year students sponsored by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, provided the following summary in 2005:
Although most respondents studied and discussed their courses with other students during the first year, findings suggest that many remain disengaged from their coursework: over half “frequently” or “occasionally” came late to class; almost half turned in course assignments that did not reflect their best work or felt bored in class; and approximately one-third skipped class at least “occasionally” in the first year.
College delinquency of this kind says nothing about these students’ intelligence. It marks an attitude, a sign of disrespect, and we may blame several influences for its spread. When colleges treat students as consumers and clients, they encourage it, as does pop culture when it elevates hooky-playing tricksters such as Ferris Bueller into heroes. College professors complain all the time about it, but they have their own part in the students’ negligence, for they pass it along whenever they esteem the students’ knowledge and deauthorize their own.
That isn’t what they think they do, of course, but the effect is the same. Many indulgers believe that teacher-centered instruction bores the kids into diffidence or proves too difficult to handle, and that student-centered instruction will inspire the lesser-caliber students to work harder and stay in school, but in fact those lesser students say otherwise. In a National Governors Association poll of 10,378 teenagers (reported in July 2005), nearly 90 percent intended to graduate, and more than one-third of them stated that high school has been “easy” (less than 10 percent called it “very hard”). Surprisingly, the future dropouts scored similarly on the “hardness” index. Of the 11 percent who admitted that they didn’t intend to graduate from high school, only one in nine gave as a reason, “schoolwork is too hard.” At the top, at 36 percent, was the claim that they were “not learning anything,” 12 points higher than sheer “hate” for the school they attend. The reactions of delinquent college students are less extreme than that, but they echo the high school dropouts’ motives. When “instructor-domination” decreases, a few students step up their learning, but most of them cut their discipline, now and then blowing off in-class duties and all the time ignoring their teachers out of class. A 2005 report sponsored by Achieve, Inc., on college and workplace readiness heard less than one-quarter of high school graduates say that they were “significantly challenged and faced high expectations” (
Rising to the Challenge: Are High School Graduates Prepared for College and Work?
). In the
First-Year
study, only 30 percent of students studied 11 or more hours per week, and 39 percent did six hours or less. Only 24 percent “frequently” felt that their courses inspired them “to think in new ways.” Half the students (49 percent) visited an instructor’s office hours a sorry two times or fewer per term. Let the students guide themselves, and they’ll do so happily.