IN his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams, the grandson of the sixth American president wrote a treatise on the value of experiential learning and concluded that his alma mater, Harvard University “as far as it educated at all . . . sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens.
“Leaders of men it never tried to make” his schooling, replete with drunken revelry and privileged classmates, did not prepare him for a world of radical change, the birth of radio, X-rays and automobiles. In is most memorable intellectual smack down he added “Harvard taught little and that little ill.”
Today’s undergraduate education of course is far more than just the canon of classics that Adams studied. Given the heavy investments in technology, it is hard to argue that universities and colleges do not prepare students for the job market or the digital world we live in, however, the question remains: What should a student learn in college?
Every college tries to do what it says in the brochures; to help students reach their potential.
However, most schools do not know what that means nor do they know who is failing to achieve that full potential.
It is called value added; an elusive measurement of the thinking skills and the body of knowledge that students acquire between their first and senior years. In other words, how much smarter are students when they leave college than when they got there?
Take reading for example, while most students have the skills to derive a surface understanding of what they read, they have difficulty when asked to defend or elaborate upon this surface understanding.
In a class, 70% of the students can pick out the general theme of an essay or a book yet only 25% come away with in-depth comprehension of what they read.
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No one reads for nuance, they pay no attention to detail. It is amazing to note how little students manage to glean from a book they have read, to the point where they are often unable to recall the names of prominently mentioned figures.
So much escapes them, even those of above average ability absorb no more than a dusting of detail from the printed text. Without such detailed information, it is impossible for them to gain a real understanding of what the author is saying.
The rate at which students read at selective colleges use to be twelve to fifteen books over a fifteen week semester. Today it is four to five books and they had better be short texts written in relatively simple language.
As one might expect, students who do not read at an advanced level cannot write well either.
Their knowledge of grammar is not bad, but the number of words available to express their thoughts is very limited and the forms by which they express themselves are also very limited.
More often, they give mangled sentences, essays composed without the slightest sense of paragraphing, and writing that cannot sustain a thought for more than half a page.
Along with this impoverishment of language comes a downturn in reasoning skills.
Students are no longer trained in logical analysis and consequently have difficulty using evidence to reach a conclusion. Most students spend more time expressing attitudes towards things rather than analysing.
They are always ready to tell you how they feel about an issue, but they have never learnt how to construct a rational argument to defend their opinions. No account of the present condition of college students would be complete without mention of the extraordinary dearth of factual knowledge they bring to class.
Though not always recognised, a direct connect exists between this deficit in factual knowledge and the decline in verbal skills.
Most reading after all, is at bottom a form of information processing in which the mind selects what it wants to know from the printed page and files it away for future use, in conducting that operation of selecting, interpreting and storing information, the reader constantly relies on his or her previous stock of knowledge as a vital frame of reference.
No matter how fascinating or valuable a new detail might be, a person finds it almost impossible to hold in memory and have available for retrieval unless it can be placed in some kind of larger context.
Little wonder that so many students experience great difficulty in absorbing detail since they have no context in which to fit what they read, it quickly flows out their minds.
Unable to retain much, they find little profit in reading, which leads them to read less, which in turn makes it harder for them to improve their reading skills.
Many students enter college with high ambitions, only to find those ambitions dashed in many cases by inadequate skills and knowledge.
Some give up in frustration while the rest go through the motions learning and contributing little until it is time to graduate.
What are the fundamental substantive issues that must be dealt with if we really what to restore excellence to our schools?
Dramatically increase the quality and quantity of assigned reading for students at all levels. By the senior year of college, students should be reading the equivalent of at least twelve books a year not counting textbooks.
Since reading is a learned skill that can almost invariably be improved by practice, the sheer number of pages counts, the more the better. However, there should also be an effort to make the assigned text as complex and challenging as possible.
In the end nothing builds the command of language faster than this kind of regimen.
Institute a flexible programme of ability grouping at both the elementary and secondary school levels. Few issues in education can raise tempers faster than ability grouping and few are more badly misunderstood.
The most common error is to confuse ability grouping with “tracking” a practice in which students are sorted out at an early age according to their scores on intelligence tests and placed in separate tracks for fast, medium and slow learners where they remain through high school.
Ability grouping works on the guiding principle that aims at not giving privileged treatment to any one group but rather to provide instruction closely tailored to the learning needs of each child.
It is obvious that with children of different ability levels in the same classroom, everything will tend toward a level just a notch above the lowest common denominator. Instead of being challenged to develop their talents to the fullest, the most capable students will be forced to work in effect at half speed.
The math problems set before them will require little effort on their part to solve, the English texts will not stretch them in the least.
As a result, these students quickly discover that there is no reason for them ever to extend themselves, that they can coast through school with minimal effort.
