This past week, the New York Slimes published an op-ed by Annie Murphy Paul about the inherently discriminatory aspects of the paradigm of the American university lecture experience.
It is passages like this one that really make a white male like myself feel the need to check my privilege:
“Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. This is not a matter of instructor bias; it is the lecture format itself — when used on its own without other instructional supports — that offers unfair advantages to an already privileged population.”
It’s so relieving, actually, to rest assured that being a white Anglo-Saxon protestant isn’t any longer a crime against humanity. In fact, it is the system itself which is to blame for favoring folks like myself against aforementioned peers. It’s the perfect culprit to this modern obsession of generalized inequity—the problem is not so much the socio-economic disparities amongst student groups, but the ensuing evolution of the academy to fit the demands of the elite.
Not only does such rationale teach college students to be aware of the cultural biases of the collegiate paradigm, but the real moral to take away here is deeper than that: when life gets tough, just blame the man for making life unfair.
But in all candor, imagine accomplished American minorities like Ben Carson or Clarence Thomas lambasting the system for its discriminatory bias against their racial backgrounds. It’s hard to do because both men have spoken adamantly against this populist rise in nurturing in young people a mindset based in helplessness via one’s race or minority status. Neither has gotten anywhere in their equally accomplished careers by bemoaning the system for the inevitable toils and failures of the noble path to success.
It is rhetoric of people like Ms. Paul which corrodes the very foundation of the American dream. For it is the linearity of the function of success, that hard work and determination yields reward, that inspires young people to pursue degrees of higher education in the first place.
The minute we as Americans stop believing in the legitimacy of the American dream is the minute we cease to lose all contact with notions of advancement and progress at the individual and societal levels. Wild political correctness, spewing from the pages of washed up progressive publications like the NY Times, only wins if we choose to let it infiltrate our rational selves.
College is hard. And for some people, it’s extremely so. But I don’t doubt for one second the notion that with any legitimate fortitude anyone is capable of expanding their academic horizons.
Because, if my autistic brother can successfully do so, so too can the young man from the inner city or the young lady from a third-world country.
Ms. Paul raises a few interesting points regarding alternative methods of university teaching, which may be applicable/relevant at certain smaller, liberal arts schools; however, the reality is that the lecture system predominant at most universities has been left fairly unchanged for three generations, and all these generations across all measures of race have experienced general increases in wealth and economic status. These are the generations that have brought America to the forefront of the industrial and post-industrial world, and they didn’t do so by claiming the university system that started them on the paths to such success screwed them over.
But I suppose that is a poor example, because all of the key economic contributors of the past century didn’t actually “build that”, according to Barry-O. Just like the evil well-off, second and third generation college students didn’t build their own success in the classroom, according to Annie Murphy Paul.
I would not be surprised if Ms. Paul owns a company that just happens to be in the business of selling “instructional supports”.
I’m an educator and I certainly find active learning techniques to be effective. However, the emotive language that its advocates use to push these teaching tools onto educators is risible. If one actually examines what the techniques are designed to do -get students to review the material daily instead of cramming before exams, have students ACTUALLY do the assigned reading, get students to pay attention in class instead of messing around online -one realizes that these are skills that good students should already have by the time they reach college! I remember when I was a freshman (12 years ago), I was told by my adviser that unlike in high school, no one was going to make sure I did the problem sets, and no one was going to hold your hand and make sure you understood the material. It was up to me to make sure I kept up. Sink or swim. Increasingly, college is becoming what high school used to be – a basic prerequisite for the mediocre masses instead of an institution of higher learning where highly motivated individuals pursue knowledge and skills to advance themselves. Active learning is the natural extension of grade inflation, designed to coddle the paying customer and delay their inevitable realization that nothing comes to those unwilling to work for it. Finally, note that these techniques don’t eliminate racial disparity -the overwhelmingly white or Asian kids who were getting A’s in traditional lectures are all getting A+’s in active learning classes. Its just that non-Asian minority students are now getting C’s instead of failing, and frankly C’s in Physics 101 isn’t going to get you a job at NASA, yo. Thus educators should certainly adopt these techniques to avoid having to grade mind-numbingly stupid exam answers, but calling those professors who choose to do things the way they’ve always done them racist is just plain demagoguery.