The educational pendulum – a step too far?

 

S

Something is wrong in the kingdom of Denmark, educationally speaking. or so it seems to me. The attitude towards and, consequently, of educational institutions has changed 180 degrees over my life. They have gone from being a provider of God-inspired, figuratively, wisdom to an issuer of career–required, literally speaking, certificates. The teacher, once the kingpin, has become a cog in a complicated system of wheels powered by money. I understand the change and appreciate how much it has improved education but I feel it is time for the pendulum to go in the other direction.

The journey of my generation began with the teacher as God’s assistant (or maybe vice versa). Teachers decided what we needed to learn, which was accepted without question by both students, their parents and administrators. The system created a dogma, often unjustified, that educators somehow knew what we, the students, needed to understand in order to be successful in life. Questioning was taboo, as I discovered as late as 2000 when I did my MBA at a British university. During my college years, in the 1970’s, at some universities, such as UCSC where I studied, it was possible to talk with teachers on a friendly basis and even disagree about interpretation. However, nobody, including the college administration, openly disputed the teacher’s basis for assessment and the right to fail those that did not meet their criteria.

Today, in many if not most institutes of higher education worldwide, students are the customers, i.e., the college needs their tuition to survive. As high school testing standards have deteriorated over the decades, the gap between the assumed and actual knowledge of students beginning their degree programs has widened significantly. This discrepancy, combined with the ever-increasing tuition fees, has created a serious financial dilemma for college administrators: colleges need paying students in order to be able to keep their doors open. At the same time, the academization of professional life has made attaining the appropriate certificates essential for attaining most jobs, e.g., BAs for nurses. Finally, fundamental faith in the system, the belief that the people up there know what they are doing, has dropped to critical levels, also often justifiably. These crises together have created an atmosphere where an unspoken agreement exists in which students, their parents, administrators and even many teachers believe that an institution, when faced with a conflict between a student’s lack of knowledge and need for the certificate, should opt to issue the latter. Colleges and universities have become, to one degree or another, factories for diplomas, not actual knowledge. Interestingly enough, most people recognize and accept this phenomenon.

I, as a “dinosaur” who will retire from institutional college teaching in Israel in three semesters, find it disturbing that too many first-year Israeli engineering students I teach can pass my English course without knowing how to write a proper sentence in English or even in their native tongue, let alone a paragraph, not to mention create an organized argument. For me, effective communication is an essential skill. The world does not care if English is the second or even third language. As I tell my students, if a customer asks whether or not a bridge will bear a given weight, you need to be able to produce a coherent answer. My college, to be fair, is slightly more insistent on keeping testing standards up than many others. However, the unspoken and spoken message is that it is not “good for the college or department” if too many students fail. Teachers, beware.

At the same time, students should be made aware that they will be shortly entering the world of real work without many of the tools they need to be effective and that this lack will impact their own professional lives, not to mention those affected by the results of their work. It is clear that the omniscient and omnipotent status of teachers not so long ago was unjustified and harmful. On the other hand, the perception of a teacher as a clerk functioning as a cog in the system is equally unjustified and harmful. It is time to find a reasonable medium between these two extremes. The pendulum needs to start swinging in the other direction.