Quality Education: Better than Prozac?
May 15, 2007
I was listening to Bill McKibben on Alternative Radio today, who made some interesting points about how since the 1960s, the “happiness quotient” of Americans has gotten progressively lower—ie, many more of us are depressed and unhappy now than have were in the first half of the 20th century, and probably before that, too.
McKibben speculates that this is due to the hyper-individualism of American society, which leads us to spend much more time either immersed in work, or alone at home. Even in nuclear families, the tendency today is for each member of the family to be off in his or her corner, plugged into some kind of electronic media machine, instead of socializing with others.
Somehow we seem to have convinced ourselves that “texting” on AOL, MySpace or Facebook, or emailing, or being on the receiving end of TV and other media entertainment is a reasonable equivalent of face-to-face time with friends and family.
It isn’t.
This is part of the same trend that put laptops in school classrooms in the vain hope that the machine would be a more powerful learning aid than a dynamic teacher and engaged peers.
As a college teacher, I have been concentrating more and more on improving the collaborative learning skills of my students. In my classroom, learning is less about my feeding students with my pre-digested knowledge, and more about helping students to feel the excitement that comes with sharing ideas, exploring unknown territory, and working together to come up with new insights.
At every level of education, teachers need to focus on enhancing the interactive, face-to-face excitement of learning, as a deliberate counter to an increasingly alienated social environment.
I was not at all surprised to read in today’s New York Times about an ACT study showing that only one in four teens who have taken four years of college preparatory core courses in high school are actually prepared for college. That’s because our whole public school education has been geared towards passing multiple-choice tests, rather than the dynamic, collaborative problem-solving across disciplines that characterizes quality college education.
What’s really a shame is when you see this same dumbed-down, rote-learning multiple-choice approach occurring in college as well—what a swindle for students who think that the struggle to get their BA is going to be worth a lot to them in the long run.
Each of us gets only one shot, at least in this lifetime, at our 12 to 20 years of education. A very few might get to do it over again, or do it later in life, but for most of us, these first 25 years are absolutely crucial to the unfolding of the rest of our lives. We owe it to our children, and ourselves, to make these the most exciting, value-laden days of our lives.
We have the know-how. We just need the collective understanding and determination to make the necessary improvements in educational policy and teacher training. Will the political and educational leaders who can make this happen please stand up?
