College Illiteracy

Yesterday in the Boston Globe, Michael Kryzanek  wrote:

The United States is recognized as having the world's best system of higher education, but that does not mean that the system is graduating students who are prepared to understand the world or, more importantly, have benefited from the wisdom of the greater thinkers, writers, scientists, and historians while they were occupying space in classrooms.

Behind the dismal data on college graduate literacy is the new reality of higher education in America. Students today have little interest in what past generations of college students accepted as an essential education. Reading the literature of ''dead white guys," studying the relevancy of a 400-year-old historical event, and thinking about the meaning of life's mysteries are not of great interest to a growing number of college students.

Now, it's all about focusing on a career path, studying narrowly about the skills required of that career path, and then crossing the stage on graduation day. The only problem, as the literacy study shows, is that this short-cut route to postgraduate adulthood leaves behind the building blocks of an educated person.

Actually I think this trend starts in high school.  Forget having a passion for history or literature--just score well on the APs so you can get out of your general education requirements.  Forget taking a chance on a field of study where you might struggle--can't jeopadize that GPA, you know.

And it is part of the contempt for the life of the mind, of nuance, that is so marked in American culture.  I don't know what is to be done, other than guard my own children from that sort of attitude.

I decided to go look at what actual college professors were saying, and stumbled across Rate Your Students,  an anonymous blog by a college professor who reports:

I must confess the initial goal was pretty simple: give beleaguered faculty members a chance to vent some of the frustration that comes from BEING a beleaguered faculty member!

The majority of mail I get comes from faculty who seem tired of dealing with disengaged and uninterested students. When students hear this, they often write in encouraging faculty to be more like Jon Stewart or Chris Rock. Students want a show. Students think they've PAID for a show - oh, and a really good grade, too, please.

What I have always known is that there's a huge disconnect between what professors and students think the goal of college is. And that disconnect is the root of a lot of the tension.

One of his correspondents writes about the pain of being rated:

I have mixed feelings about your site. I don’t want to publicly criticize my students. But then I DO want some kind of response to ratemyprofessors. So I might, from time to time, write fictitious anectodes/ratings/etc. to feel like a part of the response.

I don’t hate teaching and I don’t hate my students. I hate that there are negative comments out there about me—public and anonymous ones—when 95% of my official student evaluations are positive and when all of my department reviews are stellar. I hate that students post anonymously, and as though professors aren’t human and have put so little energy into their students and their courses that they won’t be affected by someone saying “her class made me stupider.”

I have been haunted by that comment for months. Perhaps if I didn’t care about my students and my teaching I would just get over it. Perhaps, too, if I was not underpaid AND feeling more like a high school teacher most of the time, I could take the criticism a bit better.

Rate My Professor  is a free online service that allows students to evaluate their professors' performances anonymously.

"RateMyProfessors.com's network reach has doubled in each of the past three years," explained Richard Lightner, the site's senior IT development manager. "Currently we're working on additional features that will accommodate the site's expected rate of growth. We'll (RateMyProfessors.com) surpass 75 million page views this December."

While the site is ridiculously popular with students, university administrators and professors are finding it neither funny nor instructive. "By and large, RateMyProfessors is unmentionable in university administrations," said Kenneth Westhues, a sociology professor at the University of Waterloo who completed a study of the rating site last year. "Many professors won't even admit that they look at their ratings on the website", wrote Joanna Glasner, of Wired News -- September 29th, 2005.

 

Comments

[Michelle Bush]

Ironically, I tell my students that if they put as much effort into their studies as they do in deriding their instructor, they may become scholars some day. However, I'm amazed by the number of students in college who "hate to read." I'm even more dumbfounded by those who "hate to read" and take online courses.

If I had a dollar for everytime a student says, "nobody told me that," I could retire a wealthy woman. My comment is, "if instructors could 'tell' you all you need to know to be successful in college, there would be no need for text books." What the heck, their not going to read them anyway.

[Baxie]

After 30 years of teaching at the high school and college levels, I have decided to end my unwitting support of a hoax. The primary propellant of our institutions of higher learning is GREED. A huge number of students gain entry because of the almighty dollar. Our education sector has sold its soul for the gold of mammon.What sector of society has not done the same?

At the age of ten, I rode my bike two miles to the library so that I might contemplate the golden thoughts offered to me by the books I could borrow. Many years later, I feel betrayed. I have tried, often alone, to hold the line and encourage critical thinking. Now, I have decided that I am not enough of a masochist to continue teaching as an adjunct. My pension is sufficient for my needs. I can no longer torture myself by reading the writing of students that are barely literate. The greed machine wil continue and the humanities will lose their humanity as students remain willing participants in the greed machine called education. Critical thinking is, afterall, not FUN AND EASY!