The Grand Illusion
In another week or so, my wife the professor will return to work full-time, and she’ll be faced with the often blank faces of students who are or who think they want to be voice majors, either as teachers or performers. Of course, what few of them comprehend is that all successful voice major graduates will end up both performing and teaching. The only question is what percentage of their careers is spent performing and what percentage is spent teaching.
Unfortunately, despite “good grades” and standardized test scores, far too many of the students she teaches:
Cannot or will not read, especially textbooks, unless forced, and often not then.
Have great difficulty concentrating enough to be able to listen.
Have great difficulty actually thinking.
Expect to be spoon-fed knowledge rather than actually learning it.
Want everything in education to be interesting and entertaining.
Don’t have the faintest idea of how to work intellectually or vocally.
The students with these difficulties also generally are wed to their cellphones.
Students like these used to be a small minority, but every year for roughly the last fifteen years, the percentage of students with these difficulties has increased. These are not stupid young people. They just haven’t developed the skills of reading, writing, listening, concentrating, problem-solving, and working hard, and by the time they reach college it’s too late for most of them to do so.
And they wonder why they’re struggling, and often blame their difficulties on their professors, the school, and/or their classmates. Some go into deep depressions. Some drop out, and some muddle through, and the university categorizes them as successful graduates.
This doesn’t surprise me; I see college age people working in reasonably nice restaurants and stores (that by all appearances aren’t bad to work in) many of which are ok, but merely adequate, seem blandly indifferent, and in any quiet moment are on their smartphones…when there’s probably something else that could be done, which is almost always the case in restaurants and stores. Not that they shouldn’t have breaks, but those should be away from public view; it doesn’t look great to have one’s attention on one’s phone while supposedly working.
Would you attribute this just to the high availability of online and/or social media distractions, to failure of earlier education, parenting, all of the above, or something else? There’s certainly the appearance that they’ve too long been coddled with low expectations of them.
“ … failure of earlier education, parenting, all of the above, or something else. … ”
The “average child” can and does “learn” behaviors through their grade school years. The first 3 grades may very well be assisted by entertaining teaching but after that insistence on analysis would be to the fore. During their teens spilling over into their twenties they will tests their limits against those imposed by the world in which they find themselves. By the time they are in high school they should know or start to know their strengths and weaknesses as noted by their primary cultural mentors – their parents. At high school they are already experiencing instruction by being told to “learn this” and (in my opinion) they should at least be taught how to construct a learning template (how the dots are connected) for that subject at the beginning of the school year. This form of instruction might not be unreasonable into their freshman year at university, especially in the US where there is such a huge (apparently parent determined) variation in the amount of acquired knowledge.
After that it should not be up to the teacher to “spoon feed” the subject only to test the student’s progress. The teacher should be clear in the presentation of material and the specifics of expected results of learning e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYZESI8uAF4
Exercises for maintaining a healthy voice
Sep 21, 2020.
How con we citizens help make it happen?
I am so glad that I am a retired lecturer. Whilst I had many students who were interested in my subject matter, I also had those who showed no independent desire to read, investigate or draw their own conclusions to academic research. I think we have inherited students who have never had a chance to work hard or learn in robust but boring ways. Too much early education has had to be taught in fun ways with the emphasis on entertainment. This does not prepare them for higher education or the often dull world of real work.
If we do not accept smart phones as the cause of intellectual apathy then I have two questions (spoon feeding accepted).
Are not “good grades” and standardized test scores supposed to confirm that the students:
Can or will read, especially textbooks, without being forced.
Have no difficulty concentrating enough to be able to listen.
Have no difficulty actually thinking.
Have no expectation to be spoon-fed knowledge.
I have difficulty in understanding what you mean when using the phrase “spoon-fed knowledge” and the phrase “actually learning it (knowledge)”.
I assume “spoon fed” is: – provide (someone) with so much help or information that they do not need to think for themselves. If so then how does the teacher arrive at the point balancing the amount of help the “average” student should be provided by the teacher of a specific subject?
I assume “learning” is: – the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. If so is not “teaching” the source of “learning” how to acquire such understanding etc. of the specific subject and would that not differ somewhat for each subject just as “hard work” differs when considering it in relation to digging ditches compared to programing software.
I completely disagree that smart phones are the cause of intellectual apathy.
All too much of pre-college education is still stuck in an archaic framework. Centuries ago, the British East India Company needed competent clerks to staff their offices across the globe. To this end they created the current system, to drill students to be able to be clerks.
The kids nowadays have grown up with computers in their pocket, and they aren’t stupid. They don’t need to be trained as clerks, accountants, or even computer programmers. They need to be educated to think.
In the United States, the patchwork system of funding and administration of public school stands in the way of creating a pre-college education that will be useful to the kids and society.
Not enough people care that the system is archaic and foolish, so it persists.
The problem is that smart phones too often discourage thinking, especially for difficult subject matter.
Decades ago, the rise of calculators led to the decline in being able to do mental arithmetic. I agree that the rise of smartphones is leading to the decline in thinking.
The rise in AI will no doubt lead to the decline of putting words and thoughts together to express or articulate anything.
I’d say the rise of smartphones isn’t a decline in thinking per se, but it’s definitely a decline in memorisation, especially rote memorisation. We don’t need to memorise contact details, or shopping lists, or many other short term things. And general knowledge has shifted from “what you know” to “what you know how to find quickly”. It’s a different skill.
Plenty of decades ago, I went off to college. Why? Because that was the next step after high school.
Unfortunately for me, I really had no idea at age 18 what I wanted to do with my life. I knew what I wanted to become, but not what I wanted to do.
I got through, and actually learned some things that served me later.
It was only when I found work I considered meaningful that I was really motivated to learn what I could to get better at it.
Might just be me, of course. But some percentage of students are probably similarly flailing. Adolescence is a tough time to make rest-of-life decisions. Not enough input yet.
One reason for this is societal, and it ties into credentialism.
There was a real shift around 20-30 years ago, where university changed from being where the bright kids went to a place where everyone needed to go. Degrees moved from being advanced qualifications to being bare requirements, even though often they weren’t needed for the role. Over the same time direct apprenticeship style pathways into the trades largely dried up, because companies don’t want to pay for training staff any more.
So the average undergraduate intake now includes a significant percentage of students who have little desire for education but who need to get certified in *something*. So often they’ll move to study areas they are wildly unsuited for, before dropping out and shifting to other programs.
I think that you have hitt he nail on the head.
Credentialism is correct. Corporations need people who can carry out somewhat complicated tasks without asking too many questions to get a reward. These tasks need to be carried out without knowing the full context of the why. This is what college graduates learn. If they take a set of courses and display reasonable mastery of those courses, they graduate. They now are certified that they will do seemingly unnecessary tasks both short-term and long-term to achieve a goal. This translates into a good corporate employee.
This is essentially a much more complicated version of training rats. The problem is that there are only so many positions for rats in the world and not every one can be a rat in a maze hitting the button for food pellets.
But in a similar way high schools are measured by how many students go to college. I have not seen a high school bragging about their 10-year success rate. I don’t think anyone collects those numbers but most everyone is stuck in the measurement game. Our goals become what is measured. The goals don’t change when they don’t make sense because we are trained in carrying out complicated tasks without asking too many questions.
> Our goals become what is measured.
Yes. And then the next step from there is ignoring what is difficult or impossible to measure.
And the next step from *there* is to measure only that which is easy to measure.
Which ends up in an entire student body/workforce whose qualifications are unrelated to anything meaningful.
I don’t agree.
Years ago, I had a conversation with an older engineer about calculators. He told me about using a slide rule in school and being graded on the ability to get results to the thousandth place. He asked how we could be graded if we were using calculators. I replied, “We are graded on whether we know the formula to use, not on our manual dexterity.”
There’s a similar challenge for teachers nowadays. Kids will cheerfully use smartphones to answer stupid questions that require memorization of things that can be looked up.
As I said above, we shouldn’t be trying to teach kids to be clerks for the British East India company.
But as I also said, education policy in the United States is a patchwork quilt of questionably managed school districts. Schools in rich neighborhoods where parents have many resources, are well-funded. Schools in poor neighborhoods where parents are working multiple jobs, are poorly funded. This doesn’t make sense.
Given the mismanagement and poor policy in education, it’s no surprise that kids are not engaged.
I thought that universities taught to question which is why i got in trouble when I joined the UK territorial army at university to gain some extra pocket money.
I asked what was the point of marching up and down on parade grounds. The answer was that this trains you to obey orders quickly and accurately and not question.
It used to in the US but based on feedback from companies hiring college graduates, more and more requirements were added to get a degree. Also, the thinking is focused on the major and how to solve those problems not thinking in general.
> whether we know the formula to use … Suggests that rote learning is all that may be needed; but to know which formula to use one has to analyze the critical components of the question to be answered and also know the function of each component of the chosen formula.
> universities taught to question … The instructor obviously had analyzed marching and knew the most important component of warfare – coordinated cooperation.
I think this is what we observe as being missed in some temples of education and what LEM – the teacher keeps reminding us about.
The problem with trying to claim Smart Phones ruins the mind is that it’s, well, nonsense. And it’s repetitive throughout history.
I literally heard speeches like this when I argued that memorizing complex math was unneeded if I had a calculator.
I’ve seen news articles condemning TV, Radio, Books…
For that matter, I’m a history buff, I have trouble remembering exact dates, always did. I had teachers lament how I’d never understand history since I couldn’t rattle off dates of certain wars, events or battles.
But I knew those events and why they were important better than most of my teachers. The fact that I’d have to go double check exactly what numbers go next to, say, the Sengoku Jidai, does not change my ability to discuss it’s ramifications on the impact it has down the line and how it essentially lead to Japan’s WW2 errors….
You remind me of a great reference to Aristotle in 400BC … from part 12 of Rhetoric on the follies of youth
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.2.ii.html
“They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things-and that means having exalted notions.”
“They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything.”
Although we might concentrate on the negative aspect of the social media of youth and their smartphones there maybe a positive feature to these super-added –appendages.
On smartphones people do play games and they do get exposed to the wheeling and dealing within human interactions. Thus analysis of data is involved and, to some extent, they must learn from other people’s missteps and mistakes.
As with some teachers, smartphone information does not automatically offer a person a system for achieving answers to problems. Every person does not see the same shape in a Rorschach like mass of data – some form of guidance is required from someone else.
Perhaps this is the reason for the increased presence of so-called “influencers” and for the ease of radicalization of people via the social media? This may also be why pressure from teachers fails to get through to the students because most teachers preserve their cool unlike the “populists” and “influencers”.