Here is one of her examples:
Thirty-six percent of students experience no significant improvement in learning (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) over four years of higher education.The problem is, institutions in trouble, like Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union or [pick your favorite], tend to be in denial right up to the crash.
Folks aren't calling it an "education bubble" for no reason.
Regards — Cliff
The problems attendant to the qualitative decline in American higher education are many. However, there are some basic issues that underpin much of the malaise that affects university learning today. First among those key impacts is our society's insistence on rewarding mediocrity and failure. "No Child Left Behind" and all of the other related programs over the past 50 years are but samples of this attitude. We are simply unable to accept that some kids are going to be left behind....at least to the extent that sending them off to a university education is a fraud on them individually and a waste of money. It isn't that those kids are defective, are stupid, but rather that their whole character doesn't suit them well for that sort of life experience. These are the folks who will form a significant portion of the workforce in manufacturing and service industries.....all respectable things to do and to be.
ReplyDeleteWe also fail to understand that failure IS a motivator. One of the saddest pronouncements I have heard is a coach of a young boys Pop Warner team after yet another loss intoning to his young charges, "Hey, you guys are winners." No they're not!!! Life is not going to say to them when they fail, "Hey, you didn't fail. You won." Life is full of winning and losing, and if the loss is recognized as an opportunity to come back and succeed, then in the long run, it CAN be a positive.....but first it has to be humiliating. And the road back can't be laced with artificial softeners. You have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Kids must realize that what they do is their signature...their evidence to the rest of the world of their value...value that will be rewarded accordingly.
In a very real sense, life is hard, and then you die. Sorry.....that is how it is...and for some..unfortunately...it is very hard.
Finally, America HAS to get over the notion that learning is an event. It is not. It is a process that continues through life and builds on everything that has gone before it. One of the major weaknesses in our system of education (aside from the fact that the "system" is more a monolithic institution that moves forward on its own misguided inertia) is that it fails to teach HOW to learn. One of the most effective ways to do that it to contextualize learning content in such a way as it has relevance to the learner, enabling the learner to perceive relationships between facts in order to gain understanding; the key to analysis and synthesis.
If there is one major failing in American society that threatens to doom us to the garbage heap of history, it is our abject failure to provide our young with the skills to be better than we are.