Like many colleges today, my institution has a program to introduce new students to higher education. What's surprising, perhaps, is how little we take for granted with respect to student maturity and preparation. We don't expect they'll know how to take notes (or even that they're aware they should take notes). We remind them how to behave in a classroom setting (texting, cell phone calls, and similar disruptions are proscribed). Even before they meet obstacles to learning, we alert them to counseling services that are standing by to help, as well as tutoring centers to aid with study and writing skills.
Given rising tuition costs, perhaps students deserve (or, at least they've come to expect) all these helping hands. But I wonder if a hand-holding approach to education is ultimately stunting rather than aiding them. Is all this coaching -- all these support networks -- truly helping students to mature and become responsible, self-motivating adults?
We can shed some light on this by contrasting a student-centered, help-is-on-its-way approach in college to what is expected of young enlistees in the military. The differences are, in a word, striking. After a few months of training (as opposed to years of education), we send eighteen- and nineteen-year-old enlistees overseas and task them with negotiating bewilderingly complex "human terrain" in hostile places like Iraq and Afghanistan. As they operate high-tech equipment worth millions, these "strategic privates" are entrusted to make near-instantaneous, life-or-death decisions under pressure.
Could the contrast be any starker? As we lend helping hands to immature or ill-prepared college students in the most benign of settings, we challenge young troops to make deadly choices in the harshest and most confusing of settings. As we're at pains to remind students to pay attention, to take notes, even to show up for class, we think little about deploying young troops thousands of miles from home to the world's deadliest hotspots, expecting them to behave with discretion, maturity, and valor.
A contrast this stark sets me to thinking. I wonder, for example, how many young adults join the military precisely because they'll be entrusted with responsibility (and firepower) without Mommy, Daddy, and our "Nanny State" hovering over them. Critics may see the military as authoritarian and limiting, yet young recruits may see it as liberating: as building self-reliance and resiliency in a setting free from helicopter parents, feel-good counselors, and similar "mean well" interceders.
Another stark dichotomy is the resources we devote to fostering respect for diversity among new college students versus those devoted to new troops in the same age group. Even as we strive for greater multi-cultural sensitivity and tolerance among students, we simply deploy new enlistees to countries with dramatically different cultures, expecting them to acquire cultural sensitivity on the fly in a process akin to osmosis, if not trial-by-fire. The result is predictable: Young troops, as made evident in this account by Ann Jones, are often oblivious to inappropriate, often counterproductive, behavior.
The paradox is clear: We coddle young college students even as we throw young troops into the breech. To students, we explain difficult concepts in the most basic of English, even as our troops confront the most complex of situations while wrestling with Pashto or Dari. We field a legion of "interpreters" to help students to succeed, yet we still lack language and cultural interpreters to help troops to succeed.
In hand-holding our college students and overloading our troops, we're compromising our educational efforts as well as our military ones.
And whether in school or in war, the result could very well be a failing grade.
Professor Astore currently teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, PA. He writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.
Support services at colleges hurt students? Maybe you missed the military's record suicide rate that is largely blamed on not having enough of a safety net. Getting a college education is designed to make you fluent in a particular academic discipline. Being an infantryman is not at all academic and even though you are making life or death decisions, you are following orders. Lifeguards make important decisions to, but it doesn't require a lot of intellectual heft. Your last point on diversity in the military is ridiculous; the military is not an inclusive body, and in these diverse countries that you are sent to, you blow the natives to smithereens. Yeah, that's really tolerant.
Comparing this system with the military belies the intuition that they are both symptoms of the same root cause. Undervalued, with no greater expectation on their leadership than a firearm and map in return for meeting basic human needs, points to their inability to recognize and address these problems with leaders. The troops being our eyes inside the military, but not educated on the most basic American freedoms to challenge the authority of elected officials. What surprise should it be when we are still talking about the disparity between the very real classes we don’t like to admit to instead of pointing to the origin where the value of education bestowed is in direct proportion to what your expected contribution will be.
Instead I'm required to get an accredited degree that takes three and half years, then practice for a year before sitting for licensing exams. Get a clue William.
who will be the last to die for these lies and the liars who profit from them?
smedley butler was right. "WAR IS A RACKET"
This fall I will teach at a local private college. I just got two more classes in developmental reading and developmental writing. Seems that they had to add these classes as more incoming freshman did not score high enough on entrance test to be placed in "college level" classes. So, I will try and upgrade the skills of these students to help them get ready for college level classes,,,,,,,,wow!!
It will be interesting to see the level of committment from these students. I am ready and armed with tools to motivate them, teach them and help them up their skills, will they do it? It is after all, up to the students, not me, right?
I am hoping that you , Mr Astore, would like to know what happens in my classes this fall. I would be happy to share more with you as the semester goes along.
Certainly, one reason we've lowered expectations for today's college freshmen is that they're less well prepared. It's also true that they're less well disciplined, perhaps in part because so many technologies distract them. And it's also true that some schools have stressed building self-esteem over self-discipline. Students feel good about themselves, but their skills are inadequate, and they lack the dedication and attention span to focus and improve them.
Again, this is true only of some students. Many students are well prepared and ready to learn, and some of those who are behind do work very hard to catch up. As a teacher, there's no better feeling than to help hard-working students to improve and succeed. Good luck!
I am excited for the opportunity to work at the college. I spent the last 20 years teaching for the local school system and eventually the community college. I taught the GED program. Although my students this semester will be (most of them) high school grads, they will still have a lot of the same needs as those that study for the GED. It is a matter of what I like to call "an awakening of skills" for the students. I had many adults that came to our GED program that only needed that nudge of confidence and a little "awakening" before they took their test.
I am going to approach my college freshmen students in the development classes as I approached my former students. I believe as you stated that along with self-seteem, students need to learn self-discipline to enable them the skills to tackle the hard tasks of life!
If I may, I would love to send you some of my experiences, probably through e-mail if ok with you!!
Thanks again! Oh and I am a proud mom of a Lt in the US Army, who is currently deployed to Iraq.
A bit of an overstatement. Most, after minimal training are grunts and canon fodder doing what they are told after having been beaten down and brainwashed. Survival of the fittest literally determines the rest. Yes, there are learning opportunities and advancement for the motivated, but they would not likely have needed coddling in college.
Interesting put down.
College students are not SUPPORTED by the government and the taxpayers like the military. You want to talk about support? The military is fed, clothed, trained, housed and PAID by taxpayers. College students work menially usually and struggle with debt to learn to do things like educate other people, design structures, research, and heal the sick. And they're constantly taking c**p from ignoramuses! I am SICK of the contempt of the ignorant masses for academic students.
Try the MCAT or the LSAT or a Graduate Record Exam in physics and see if your hand gets held!
By the time you've begun to prepare to get into college, get in, get through, and certify professionally, you've probably got more than ten years in the game- if you want to talk commitment. What's the army? four years of no material worries and no independent decisions?
Then all the breaks in civilian life for veterans- even veterans of places like the public relations office at fort benjamin harrison, indiana- a by FAR more typical military experience than combat... But veterans have "served". Not many have served like the people who educate your kids and deliver your babies are serving, or those who care for our ill and elderly or minister to the afflicted spirits. Most of them serve with no respect in proportion to the peace they bring into our lives.
Don't start slagging college students. I just worked too hard...
If you accept this diagnosis, the prognosis may be this: By overloading our troops, we're compromising our efforts in places like Afghanistan. And by lowering our expectations for new college students, we're setting the stage for underperforming professional classes.
Despite this, at my university we had very few helping hands. During our orientation, the Dean, while admitting it was something of a cliche, did the whole "look to your left, look to your right, one of the people you see won't graduate" schtick. At Georgia Tech only ~60% of incoming freshman can expect to graduate. My first semester's physics course had a 50% fail rate. While it doesn't compare to combat (I expect few things do), college was no walk in the park.
I am also the proud mom of a LT in the Army who is currently deployed to Iraq. This is her third deployment. She is a college grad so she entered her service career when she was 22, not the typical 18 year old.
I don't think that I would like to be in one of Colonel Astore's classes; he disrespects the very students who are responsible for him having his job, which pays well over $7.25 per hour.
The professor sounds like Reagan in the sixties,
I have many great students; I have many students who are working multiple jobs; I have nothing but respect for them. My article was more about trends that I see, and one trend is making the student our customer, with the attitude that the customer is always right, and the professor is only a provider of a service to the customer, and that he/she needs to tailor the product to the needs and abilities of the customer. Such an approach leads to coddling. And if you have to remind the "customer" to show up for class, not to disrupt class with text messaging, cell phone calls, and similar behavior, those reminders create an atmosphere of a high-school-like detention hall. It's a combination of coddling and cajoling.
But if I read you right Sir, you are reminding us that the disparity of the conscription years of the 60's and 70' still exists, and may be even worse and that for the sake of our national goals, we need to toughen up on the colleges and schools and give some more training and education to the troops...
Nobody has suggested we lack firepower overseas. What we lack is brainpower, savvy, cultural awareness. The military is trying to improvise by hiring contractors and even civilian professors in "human terrain teams," but it's a stopgap measure, and possibly a case of too little, too late.
Especially with respect to action in the field, higher education and our military remain almost completely separate worlds, to include the level of expectations we assign to our respective new "recruits."
We do not teach our young children to learn foreign languages nor basic customs.
War happens.
Americans are the biggest purveyors of war.
I am one of them. I serve. I am a Reservist, but constantly subject to call, and I am fluent in other languages and cultures.
It doesn't have to about 'dead', because the more of us who are multi-faceted, the more of us to deal with at the right moment, at the right time.
This isn't about throwing your kids into danger.
It's about preventing danger by knowing in advance the people!