University of Rhode Island - Renaissance / Grist Yearbook (Kingston, RI)

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Contemporary University Is a Failure Attitudes towards teaching and learning are changing. Stu- dents (or some of them) want a university experience to be meaningful when judged by standards they would apply to ac- tivities other than conventional college educational life: read- ing assignments, discussing what they have read, and writing papers and examinations. Because they are aware of unresolved problems ranging from the Vietnam war to population pressure and pollution in Rhode Island, they feel that the courses need to be changed, somehow or other, to make them applicable, in a way the student can feel directly, to immediate social and personal problems. Student participation in determining cur- ricula, and in selection and promotion of faculty, are intended, in part at least, to realize this goal. As someone who teaches required courses almost exclusively. I am sympathetic with the proposed changes. (I had supposed that any university would give any course for which there was a sufficient demand by students.) No one has had the illusion that passing a course necessarily meant that the student had 20

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There ' s failing them, for example.

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done more than satisfy a ritual enforced by the inevitable standardization of formal education. If education has two func- tions — first, to provide private enjoyment, for a variety of rea- sons, and second, to create intellectual capital, which increases the student ' s productivity (and also to give him greater satis- faction, in that he does his job well) — the present system has serious drawbacks. Required courses or areas have an unduly large quota of uninterested students. Most classroom activity fails to provide the apprenticeship that is the best professional training. Students who are socially conscious complain that con- ventional courses and teaching fail to involve them in the im- mediate problems of society. One can think of a number of different educational systems that would be better than the present one; the difficulty is that such innovations are more expensive than the present system, which is of course more expensive than what is perhaps the best educational process of all. The most effective learning takes place when, for any reason at all. an individual becomes consumed with curiosity. He may be tortured by his inability to communicate in a for- eign language, or unable to overcome some form of racial discrimination. His efforts to reach a tolerable degree of un- certainty constitute education. Unless we atomize our formal structures, and return to some- thing combining the personal relationships between teacher and student of a medieval university with an apprenticeship system, there will be continuous conflict between the university s gradu- ation requirements and education, which is a wholly personal matter. Within the rigid structure, the best that one can hope for is that the instructor first makes the student dissatisfied with the state of his understanding so that he will initiate inquiry. Then the teacher may help the student pursue his quest, either by associating him directly with current investigation, where student participation as a junior member of a team can sharpen his analysis, or by guiding him in independent problem-solving. The major role of teachers is to convey the paramount im- portance of analytical methods of inquiry, no matter what the emotional connotations of the problem. I doubt, however, whether students impatient for more relevancy will take this view. Joel B. Dirlam Economics 21