While at the university today between classes, I was thinking about something that I’ve often thought about (and written about here a time or two, I believe): how people view education these days. In listening to students at the university talk, I’ve found that most of them – when you really get down to it – just don’t care about really learning. They’re there for the grade, for the slip of paper at the end of the road.
I spoke to a fellow a couple of days ago who’s in the third world politics course that I’m taking. I asked him if he’d dropped the American history course that we had both started out in at the beginning of the semester; I asked because I hadn’t seem him in class for two weeks, and the class meets three times a week. “No,” he says. “I can bullshit my way through that professor’s tests, so I don’t come to class that often.” I just kind of nodded and went back to what I was doing at the time. By the way, that fellow’s major is history.
I’m not stupid; I realize that many view college as just a way to get a piece of paper which has, more or less, become a requirement to get your foot into the workplace door. Certainly, I want to get one of those slips of paper, too. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But why has the desire to learn – to really learn, and not just cram to ace a test – declined so much? Maybe I’m being too idealistic in my views, but it seems to me that when you look at the behavior of higher education students in earlier time periods, they really did learn. Formerly, most students strived to master the material; now students regularly skip class because they know they can “bullshit their way through the tests.” It seems that the standards have dropped, and by a lot. What happened?
However, maybe I’m trying to graft my likes onto others. Learning for me isn’t a chore; I love it, actually, and it’s a huge part of who I am. If anything, maybe I go too far in the opposite direction: maybe I try to learn too much. I often feel like old Bilbo, “stretched thin,” like butter scraped over too much bread. I’ll find myself juggling different topics, often having to drop some until a later time. However, I try to always have something on the “learning burner,” so to speak, and thinking back, I honestly can’t remember the last time I wasn’t pursuing one subject or another. To me, the idea of taking a class and then purposefully skipping out and not learning anything, is just stupid.
What’s your take on the subject? Where does learning new stuff – regardless of what it is – rank in your life? High? Low? Not on the radar at all, as long as you’re having a good time? Do you think standards of education have dropped a lot in the past, say, century?
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