Search The Site
 
More options | Back issues
Home
News
Opinion & Forums
Careers
Multimedia
Leadership Forum
Technology Forum
Resource Center
Campus Viewpoints
Services
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
A weekly special section
Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Wired Youth Dialogue: Siva Urges Historical Perspective on Technology



Dear Mark,

The two cases you cited in your last post — the young whippersnapper on CBC declaring that “you can’t ask students to sit back passively and repeat what the teacher says any more” and the horrific results of the essay exam in Maine — demonstrate a crisis that goes far beyond the particular technological platforms that we have been discussing.

Simply put, there has been a steady and dangerous erosion of authority in teaching at all levels in America. It’s older than Facebook, even older than AOL. It’s not the fault of teachers (although many have been passive or complacent in its face). It’s not the fault of the students, who will bend toward short-term rewards and away from short-term costs no matter when they were born or what devices sit in their hands.

A few weeks ago I remarked in an offhand way on my blog that I had considered banning laptops from the class I teach at the law school. Now, this is a very common sentiment among law professors. And law students understand the arguments around such a policy very well. But I should have known better than to publish such a flippant thing without context or explanation.

Now, everyone who reads my stuff knows I am hardly a technophobe and am a passionate cultural democrat. I think the democratization of creativity and information unleashed by computers and digital networks is profound. I have written a couple of books cautiously celebrating this global phenomenon, what I now call the Technocultural Imagination. And I never suggested that students in my large undergraduate lectures on digital media should abandon all digital media at the door (how dumb would that be?).

Nonetheless, I was not prepared for what happened when The Chronicle Wired Campus blog picked up the remark. All of a sudden commenters were treating me … well, like I am sure they treat you!

One commenter wrote, “Professors shouldn’t be holding students’ hands or telling them how they should or shouldn’t learn.”

Well, that’s where I had to draw the line. Yes. Professors should be holding students’ hands. We should be telling them how they should or shouldn’t learn. That’s why we get paid the small bucks, after all. Students and the general public might not appreciate it, but we actually spend years trying to master the art of teaching. Most of us get pretty good at it. Many of us get fired if we don’t demonstrate competence at it.

I am responsible for the learning environment in my classroom. I have the power to make a student leave if she has been rude. I have the power to tell students not to use mobile phones or computers. If a student does not want me to take her to a new place, push on her beliefs, expose her to new facts and arguments, or maintain an environment that can ensure the greatest learning for the greatest number, she should drop my course (and probably out of the university).

This ain’t a spa or salon, people. You don’t get to tell us how you want your education. We spend years mastering and then refining this system and our subjects. We entertain challenges to our methods from all quarters. And we are a diverse lot. And we share notes on methods and approaches.

Please note the assumptions embedded in that comment to my post and what the young technologist said to you on CBC: The customer, no matter how young, is always right.

Well, that’s the problem. Students are not customers. Students are students. They study. We are not service providers. We are professors. We profess.

We have the privilege of working in the one profession in the country that is somewhat insulated from the shallowness of the market. But that shell is getting thinner every day. We must repair that insulation. Of course, the obscene price of private higher education makes that harder.

In my last post I lamented the nationwide rejection of the standards or logic or evidence in public matters. I don’t pretend to claim that this phenomenon is new. I know it is not. In fact, we are more literate, more capable, more connected, and more potentially engaged than at any time in human history.

All the elements of the rich democratic culture that John Dewey envisioned exist for the taking. Digital technology is a big part of that change. And I remain excited by the potential of digital culture, information delivery, deliberation, and activism.

All around us there are glimpses of that coming to fruition. This dialogue itself serves as evidence of the sort of rich conversation that was impossible a decade ago. But, as you have demonstrated in many ways, that is not enough. Too few are choosing substantial engagement. Too many are choosing distraction over depth. I can’t argue that with you, although I would like to challenge the notion (as you have heard too many times) that everything that looks shallow must be shallow.

It’s all potential. We can’t just invent, market, sell, deliver, buy, and log on. We can’t just put a $100 laptop in every village in the world, flip a switch, and watch malaria disappear. Technology does not drive history, or even personal improvement. There is so much hard work to do to make something great out of the new.

We finally have the platforms and resources to enlighten the species. But we have only been living with this stuff for about a decade. Let’s not forget that. Let’s resist the simplifying lure of technofundamentalism. But let’s also allow ourselves the possibility that these new tools can enhance learning and expand opportunity. We have not yet figured out the methods, laws, and standards that could make all these devices work for our edification rather than our distraction. That is our charge.

Distraction is the default cultural tendency of our age. We, as scholars and teachers, must fight it. We must harness whatever tropes, tools, and technologies we have at our disposal to convince the greater public of the virtues of patience, depth, and complexity. It’s a struggle that is as old as literacy, as Socrates reminds us in Plato’s Phaedrus with his recollection of a debate between Thamus and Theuth over the power of writing:

What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: They will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.

Thamus’ warnings, we have found over the centuries, was overwrought and alarmist. In fact, we would not know what Thamus warned without reading his words printed in books (in my case, in an English translation).

The lesson here for Cassandra, Thamus, Vaidhyanathan, and even Bauerlein is that we must be patient yet vigilant, open yet informed. New things need not destroy old things. And all old things were once new.

Posted at 11:09:28 AM on September 19, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. Siva, Mark, I just want to thank you for participating in the Wired Youth dialogue this week. You both put a lot of work and thought into it, and I hope our readers have enjoyed and learned from it as much as I have.

    — Alex, an editor at Brainstorm · Sep 19, 11:33 AM · #

  2. “Students and the general public might not appreciate it, but we actually spend years trying to master the art of teaching. Most of us get pretty good at it. Many of us get fired if we don’t demonstrate competence at it” (emphasis supplied).

    In an odd way, the sentences above from this thread contain the kernels of some of the problems with an appeal for more authority as a formula for education.

    If the sentences read: “Many of us get pretty good at it. Most of us get fired if we don’t demonstrate competence at it”, then authority in the classroom in the digital age might have a stronger leg to stand on in the quest for “the solution”.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Sep 19, 11:58 AM · #

  3. “Students are not customers. Students are students. They study. We are not service providers. We are professors.”

    That’s what should be pinned on the door of every faculty office. It is a core value judgment, completely neutral with respect to technology.

    Because of my interest in residential college systems within larger universities I often give talks to groups that include campus housing people, architects, business managers, and the like. A common practice on their side is to do market research to determine “what the students want.” I often begin my talks by saying — and by pointing out that I am saying this with a smile on my face — “I don’t care what the students want. I know what they ought to have, and that’s what they’re going to get.”

    Does this mean that I’m always right? Of course not. I always listen carefully to student surveys, preferences, and the like, and I often change my views based on them (but not necessarily in the direction the students would select). Until faculty involve themselves in all aspects of institutional operation, the anti-educational “customer” mentality will continue. And this is also a place where strong institutional leadership is needed: a good president should smack down any administrator who refers to a student as a customer.

    Some related items I’ve written on the anti-customer theme (sensu lato): McDonalds does not have a gong, Against theme halls, Student housing: education vs. marketing, What drives us closer to our vision gets prioritized, The global war on Taylorism.

    — R.J. O'Hara · Sep 19, 01:08 PM · #

  4. “Simply put, there has been a steady and dangerous erosion of authority in teaching at all levels in America. It’s older than Facebook, even older than AOL. It’s not the fault of teachers (although many have been passive or complacent in its face)”

    I don’t disagree with you here— in fact I think you have made an extremely important point— but some teachers did a lot more than remain passive or complacent when it came to the erosion of teaching authority.

    We probably all remember having (or working with) teachers who abused their authority or were in positions of authority despite their being completely undeserving of it. Don’t you think that students who are bullied or abused by incompetent (or even competent) teachers become just as disengaged and contemptful of authority as those who are babied and spoiled?

    Teachers shouldn’t have to earn their students’ respect and trust, but neither should they squander those things.

    — crazy horse · Sep 19, 02:19 PM · #

  5. Great post Siva. I can’t agree more with you! Could you explain that to the French?!
    This rubbish has gone for such a long time (children and student already have the knowledge, teachers just need to make them realise and exploit this inner knowledge-kind of rubbish) that there should be little surprise at the end result: de-educated students, incapable of any form of reasoning, lacking any critical abilities and lost in media studies and other basket-waving degrees…

    — Roger · Sep 19, 02:29 PM · #

  6. Nice swipe at media studies, Roger.

    As someone who was pursuing that sort of Ph.D. before being derailed by customer service-oriented, administratively induced pedagogy, I’d remind you that good media studies courses would be teaching just the sort of ideas emergent in this conversation. Over the years, quite a few engineers and computer analysts who exited my classroom thanked me for opening their minds about their future professions’ impact on society.

    Perhaps you should explore the potential coursework before lumping all programs into some scapegoat of your own invention. Not all media studies coursework is like the “art appreciation” courses so popular among the pseudo-intellectual.

    — anon · Sep 19, 08:24 PM · #

  7. Bravo to you both. A great dialog. And thanks to you both for reminding us of the importance of books and the kind of deep attention good books require. I make a related point in an op-ed that appeared this morning.

    — Harry Lewis · Sep 20, 02:21 PM · #

  8. It isn’t just a lack of respect for education; it is a lack of respect for all authority. I think one could logically trace it back to a lack of parenting, or a style of parenting which believes that entitlement is a right in this country. Why solve your marital problems when you can get a divorce, why pay for health insurance for yourself when you can just vote someone in who will pay it for you. It sucks that educators have to deal with it. I think they should nip this in the bud before it gets out of hand. Kick these kids out of your classes. I care more about them disrupting the process for the other students than I care about the ego of the professor, but respect for authority is an important part of the educational process, and is also necessary to join a majority of the workforce. Perhaps we should require a few years of military service or some similar system before they’re allowed into university? I’d be curious to see what demographic indicators exist and predict which students would be most disruptive. (i.e. public vs private secondary school, single parent vs nuclear family, urban vs rural, etc…)

    However, why listen to a teacher who quotes an “educator” from a civilization over two thousand years in the past. The one whose “democracy” really wasn’t and might have been plagued with pedophiles to boot? The one that isn’t here anymore. Asking them to relate to Greek philosophers is no different than asking an academic supervisory committee to listen to Lindsey Lohan explain for an hour how to make their college more cool. Even though she might be right, it would be a painful experience for the academic elite, and they would probably tune her out after the first five minutes. Much like I have to do in my classes, because the professor has somehow managed to turn a simple 5 minute lesson into an hour long lecture wrought with details the average student could care less about. I don’t bring this up to single you out, but to prove a point about the college experience.

    You, the educator, care about the details because you are passionate about the subject. That’s great, but save your detailed classes for Ph.D. students, the ones who have love learning for the sake of learning, not the rest of us who just want our degrees and the higher salaries we were promised when we signed up for this four year marathon of mental abuse. It’s getting more and more difficult to justify taking a bunch of classes that seem useless to our intended careers, especially when the professors seem more interested in the details rather than teaching broad concepts. It’s easier for professors to hide in obscure details, especially from an examination standpoint, than to accept that perhaps the basic concepts of their class can’t be justified by an entire semester. Let’s not forget we have to justify keeping the students here for four years no matter what, even if some of it is just filler.

    I suppose my comment on your other article should have been posted here as well, as it is somewhat applicable to the argument about teachers failing to connect with their students. I’m not saying you should grab the computer, consult the digital oracle, and tell us what Paris Hilton would say…but dear God, please stop grabbing simple topics and lessons and wrapping them in difficult to understand translations of ancient text. Update it, and make it relevant to the life they live now. Once you’ve proven you can relate, you will have a more receptive audience. I find it ironic that students spend years trying to earn acceptance in society and “get a degree” while teachers expect to walk in the door and be respected instantly. If corporate America is subject to some degree of corruption, waste, and “marketing hype”, then its reasonable to assume that this is also true of academia and a college education. Especially when it seems to be as much about trying to sell you textbooks, forcing you to live in dorms, and encouraging you to buy food on campus as well. When professors refuse to acknowledge the power (and

    But I think another point is brought up here as well. College education is NOT for everyone. Nor should it be. If every kid grew up, patiently listened and learned from their teachers throughout high school and college, and then joined the workforce, we’d be up to our armpits in people who wouldn’t serve our fast food, clean our toilets, or pick up our trash. The failure of students to succeed in the classroom might be an indicator that they do not belong there. Some might succeed much better in the master/apprentice style of education.

    Because universities are being run more and more like businesses, their admissions have broadened and they are “taking customers” from a wider base. After all, why refuse a customer at the door if he has the cash? In truth, universities do not have the capability to educate a growing number of students who enter their ranks. Because they cling to brick-and-mortar education methods, and because they enforce the “broad-base” education of the liberal arts or similar methodologies, they are incapable of catering to students who desire a more direct and focused education. These kids should be turned away at the door and directed to an associate degree program or elsewhere. And, methinks the universities need to stop advertising that a degree is the best way to break into the higher salary rank, or the most likely path to become a respected member of society. They are attracting individuals who are only interested in the goal, not the journey.

    — Michael · Sep 21, 12:19 AM · #

  9. Thanks for your well-measured thoughts. As you point out, complaints about students are about as old as complaints about teachers (ancient), and equaled perhaps only by concerns about new media technologies from the Phaedrus onward.

    Medieval profs forbade students from reading silently. Early modern profs sought to limit access to the library with its growing number of print volumes. Eventually we figured out how to manage such technologies.

    There’s no doubt we are in turbulent times. I certainly agree that as faculty it is our ethical responsibility to figure these things out and teach our students. I don’t believe that simply clinging to familiar, default methods is an acceptable, ethical choice. There are few, if any, professors who have developed substantial new media literacy who would not incorporate those technologies into their classrooms. By the same token there are few if any such faculty who would not also employ conventional classroom methods.

    Of course before we can teach our students how to use media networks for intellectual and scholarly purposes, we need to figure these things out for ourselves.

    I don’t see college faculty as a whole rising up to meet that task or even recognizing it as a responsibility. So when faculty who I know have little knowledge or experience with new media start talking about decisions they’ve made to keep technology out of their classrooms, I am understandably unimpressed. This is unethical and anti-intellectual behavior in my view. And if such faculty are willing to make such poorly thought-out decisions about technology, how should we treat their other decisions?

    — Alex Reid · Sep 21, 12:03 PM · #

  10. I can’t get past your comment that students are not customers. For years, I’ve been saying that students should demand the simple rights of consumers – a quality product for a fair price. In so many cases college professors fail to update lectures and tests, fail to create their own tests but use those created by publishers, fail to use tests as teaching tools. Many professors aren’t able to communicate information clearly. Many professors have spent years learning their subject matter but little or no time studying the art of teaching. Students have little recourse. Just as in any other profession, professors MUST be accountable to their clients, students.

    — Maggie · Sep 22, 05:25 PM · #

  11. Maggie’s reservations show how dependent we have become on the language of commercial commerce to define relationships and just about any transaction between people. To climb out of the customer metaphor is not easy for many. It sticks.

    The Society for Values in Higher Education (www.svhe.org) is holding its next summer meeting on the theme of market “values’“and the university. Papers are invited, and the best will receive awards. Also, I have just learned about The Education Conservancy, whose concern with the admissions and “marketing” strategies in higher education and whether both have a tendency to to be out of sync with an institutions mission and/or values. They are opposed to the crudities of Newsweek-type rankings.

    Finally, it’s intereting to listen to Michael’s dissing of “traditional brick and mortar methods.” Like the one’s Socrates used in Phaedrus, ya think? Yikes.

    — George T. Karnezis · Sep 22, 08:26 PM · #

  12. My credentials: I teach two online courses and struggle with these issues daily. Question: why should we expect students/young people to concern themselves with evidence based argument, weighing expert views, seeking opposing viewpoints, etc., if the President of the U.S., some presidential candidates, TV news shows, etc. do not?

    — Prue Posner · Sep 23, 06:23 AM · #

  13. P[true] ‘dat, Posner. There isn’t enough of a reality to go with our representation. Unfortunately. Since the representation of a foundation is gone, we’re going to have to find a new foundation, which will probably look a lot like a national rock bottom—and we won’t have any doubts about it when we hit it. And that’s where we’ll start the rebuilding, reformulating, and reimagining process. Lots of people gonna be shocked at how unpretty it is.

    — Luke Warm · Sep 23, 07:47 PM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.
Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education | Contact us
User agreement | Privacy policy | About The Chronicle | Site map | Help
Subscribe | Advertise with us | Press inquiries | RSS | Today's most e-mailed
Home | Chronicle Careers | The Chronicle Review