Chronicle of Higher Education commentary on uninformed students in the information age
This commentary from the excellent Chronicle of Higher Education decrying the lack of knowledge of college students is getting some play on popular social news sites. From the article:
In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don’t know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.
We’ve heard this before - it seems that at least once a month a major news outlet runs a story discussing the inability of U.S. students to place states on a map, or locate countries, or name foreign leaders, what have you. It’s clear that if we want our students to know this information, we are failing to teach it to them.
The author goes on to place the blame for this at the feet of the media, an argument that has been made many times before. He argues that the emphasis of “infotainment” over “actual news” - the environment where what is going on with celebrities is more important than what’s going on in Afghanistan - reduces knowledge of important world affairs. “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart is as close as many dare get to actual news.” He goes on to say that blogs are not a proper replacement for “real” news sources (that is to say: news agencies still actually reporting world news), and that with the explosion of content on the internet, many young people simply don’t bother keeping track of world events.
As I’ve said, this is a common complaint, but I haven’t seen many people really talk about some of the more critical causes, or methods to correct it. In my opinion, one of the real concerns is grade inflation, tied with a seemingly widespread opinion among primary school educators that history/civics just aren’t as important as reading and math. It’s far easier for the high school civics teacher to drill a few facts into the heads of the students, test on those facts once, and allow for that knowledge to atrophy. Everyone passes, they don’t complain about how civics is such a tough class that they can’t study for their math test, and the teacher doesn’t have to deal with irate parents and concerned administrators. The problem is that when courses are taught this way, the students aren’t batteries for storing the knowledge - they are capacitors. They are pumped full of information which they release onto the test page, and it is out of their concern thereafter. This is why the introductory journalism students can’t say what country Kabul is in.
To be fair, this practice takes place to some degree in every class. There is always a sense of “I’ll never have to use this in the real world, so why try to actually comprehend it” on the part of the students. I was always amazed when people in my classes would attempt really remarkable feats of rote memorization of facts rather than attempt to just understand something.
I think that this will only be solved when we can figure out a way to teach a comprehensive understanding rather than a list of bullet point facts. There are many people in education research (mostly at the college level) who are working on this, but I have to say I’m not sure that they’ve found the right way yet. We also have to put a dampener on grade inflation. I can’t stress enough how perilous I think the situation is in this regard. For too long, teachers have been reducing course content and test difficulty under pressure from administrators and parents to put on a facade of educational success. We have to return to an educational regime in which failure is an option. Only by facing the failure head on can we develop new methods and tools to improve the system and better teach the next generation of students.
