The Future of Education in America

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As we have been discussing over the last several years, what I am seeing in American education is troubling in many ways.  As with any observation about the USA, it is almost impossible to generalize broadly (except for the general statement that generalization is impossible).  A number of connected facts are unarguably true:

• Students are not graduating from either high school or college with as much academic capability as their predecessors from about 20 years ago.

Of course, what makes sense for a young person to know today is a lot different from what made sense 20 years ago.  But today's graduate arguably knows a smaller percentage of what we would expect them to know than the graduate of the nineties knew compared to what we expected back then.

• Students are far more selective about what they engage with in the classroom than in earlier years.  They are more likely to shrug off the fact that they are clearly bored in class.

Students have always been complacent about being bored in class.  Read a book or two in the popular literature, and one gets the impression that the best one can say about a classroom is that people are bored.  This is accepted without remark because it is such a common expectation.

• There is a tendency to blame teachers and professors for the fact that students are uninterested in class work.  There is also a related tendency to glorify websites and videos that feature people teaching material that students would normally expect to see in a classroom.  

It is the same --putatively boring-- material, but some little factor, perhaps the voice of the presenter, or the pace of presentation, or the colors being used in the diagrams, or the time of day at which the video is being watched makes the video far more effective than a live presentation.

What does this mean?  Students are less tolerant of factors that were considered minor in the past: what the instructor was wearing, what colors the instructor uses on the chalkboard, what time of the day it is ...  Students are getting very picky.

I had a friend who was criticized by his students for wearing a green sport coat.  I suppose a green sport coat is not the ideal choice of jacket for an instructor, but to remark on it as a formal criticism of the class goes too far.  I myself have had teachers with annoying adenoidal voices, who dressed like slobs, who taught at that horrible hour right after lunch.  But we compensated in other ways; we studied together, to offset the fact that we couldn't all pay attention every minute during the hour.

• Many students consider themselves "visual learners".  But this characteristic evidently does not extend to being able to make sense of text.  You can write a sentence on the chalkboard and outline it in red, but there are often a few students who miss a significant syntactical or semantic element in the text.

Students cannot grab the sense of something they see, either in a book or on the screen, unless perhaps the subject is something entirely un-academic, such as a piece of gossip, or something of personal interest.  The ability to get something subtle from text is gradually being lost.

It is pointless to blame high-school teachers; they can't fix up a student over a single year.  Reading is truly at least 50% the responsibility of the family.  If the family does not read, it is unlikely that the child will be a wonderful, mature reader.  (What do I mean?  I mean if you take 100 kids whose families do not read, less than 25 of them will end up reading at the inferential level.  There will be a few who transcend the limitations of their backgrounds, to be sure.)  Kids must be convinced of the value of reading (and of books) over the six or seven summers between Kindergarten and 9th grade when they are not totally too busy to read.

Have you ever got one of those jokes on e-mail?  Have you got one which screams that it is the FUNNIEST THING THE SENDER EVER SAW!  PASS IT ON TO EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE?  I mean, it's a bunch of jokes, so if they're funny, you'd probably pass them on, right?

But the sender has no confidence in your ability to see the humor in it, so it has to be pointed out in the hugest font the e-mail system will allow.  Does this tell us anything?  Will Mathematics texts have to be printed this way, say, so that kids will actually notice the stuff?

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