The Trouble With College

Recently I heard something -- a very ordinary bit of info -- that neatly summed up the trouble with college. Someone told me about a friend of hers who was a graduate student in English at Berkeley. Her friend taught a small class of freshman and sophomores. He was enthusiastic about what he was teaching, but his students were not. He couldn't make them enthusiastic, even a little. They just sat there. When I started teaching at Berkeley, I had a similar experience. My first class was introductory psychology. Over the first few months, I came to see that my students, almost all of them, had different interests than me. I thought X and Y were fascinating; they didn't.

No one is at fault here, of course. It's perfectly okay that the grad student enthused about something that leaves his students cold. It is perfectly okay that I liked Research X and Y but Research X and Y bored my students. Nothing wrong with any of this -- in fact, we need diversity of thought and knowledge, which grows from diversity of interests. We need diversity of thought and knowledge because we have many different problems to solve.

At fault is a system (Berkeley and similar colleges) that fails to value that diversity. (In fact, it doesn't even notice the diversity, except in a one-dimensional way: how much students resemble their professor.) Even worse, the system tries to reduce diversity of thought because it tries to make students think like their professors. Why should the 20 (or 800) students in one class be forced to learn the same material? The students vary greatly. Forcing all of them to learn the exactly same stuff is like forcing all of them to wear exactly the same clothes. It can be done, especially if rewards and punishments (i.e., grades) are used, but it's unwise. Just as feeding children a poor diet stunts physical growth, forcing college students to imitate their professors, instead of letting them (or even better, helping them) grow in all directions, stunts intellectual growth.

I wrote about these issues here and gave a related talk about human evolution. Aaron Swartz and I have ideas about a better way, and how to get there, which I will blog about. I will tell a 10-minute story about this as part of the Porchlight story-telling series on March 26 (Monday), 8:00 pm, Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market Street, San Francisco ($12 admission).