Posted on 12/27/2013 6:12:35 AM PST by reaganaut1
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Education thus has degenerated into a game of "trap the rat," whereby the student and instructor view each other as adversaries. Winning or losing is determined by how much the students can be forced to study. This will never be a formula for excellence, which requires intense focus, discipline and diligence that are utterly lacking among our distracted, indifferent students. Such diligence requires emotional engagement. Engagement could be with the material, the professors, or even a competitive goal, but the idea that students can obtain a serious education even with their disengaged, credentialist attitudes is a delusion.
The professoriate plays along because teachers know they have a good racket going. They would rather be refining their research or their backhand than attending to tedious undergraduates. The result is an implicit mutually assured nondestruction pact in which the students and faculty ignore each other to the best of their abilities. This disengagement guarantees poor outcomes, as well as the eventual replacement of the professoriate by technology. When professors don't even know your name, they become remote figures of ridicule and tedium and are viewed as part of a system to be played rather than a useful resource.
To be fair, cadres of indefatigable souls labor tirelessly in thankless ignominy in the bowels of sundry ivory dungeons. Jokers in a deck stacked against them, they are ensnared in a classic reward system from hell.
All parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. It is well known that friendly, entertaining professors make for a pleasant classroom, good reviews and minimal complaints. Contrarily, faculty have no incentives to punish plagiarism and cheating, to flunk students or to write negative letters of reference, to assiduously mark up illiterate prose in lieu of merely adding a grade and a few comments
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Forgot to add — “Dr. Collier is a psychology professor at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C.”
My wife was an adjunct at a large university here. Many of the undergraduate courses are actually taught by Teaching Fellows, folks pursuing a post-grad degree. Pay was a 10th of what a Full professor got per semester. And if you were a student who got a foreign TF where English was a 3rd or 4th language, good luck learning anything.
Today’s typical college student is, largely, like yesterday’s delinquent high school student.
I love that word, "credentialist." I left academia because I couldn't relate to or support their mission. Neither the professors nor the students care if they acquire practical skills. They don't measure success by what they know or what they can do. Their only objective is the academic credential, which means less and less to serious people.
There are some exceptions out there. My son and his friends are among them. My son is a chemistry major. His friends are in order: two Physics majors, a Biology major, and a Linguistics major (Asian languages). My son’s girlfriend is also a Chemistry major. These young people put some serious study time in. I know because they use my place much of the time to do so. I am very proud of them. Having said that, I hear their stories about other students who are just going through the motions. It gives me some hope in the future to see such dedicated young people.
This is the best outcome a conservative could hope for given the current professoriate is so disproportionately liberal in their ideology and regularly engages in indoctrination of the nation's youth with their leftist dogma.
I haven't seen any American students so serious about their schooling for many years. Most of them I have observed recently just want to do the minimum they can get away with so they can then go and have a good time.
I would suggest people pull out the required studies for any American university in the 1870s, and glean over what you needed to be ‘educated’. You had more demands and emphasis on thinking, or the process of thinking. We have very little thinking coming out of four-years of college today.
I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life pouring over five hundred odd books, and surveying a great deal of Socrates, Plato, and Greek philosophy. This was all after my “events” with a couple of universities, and a degree or two. Frankly, the books and study of Greek philosophy made me smarter and more open to thinking....than I was before.
Somewhere over the past century....we lost sight of the value of thinking. We marginalized the thought process. We mass-produce people with degrees...who can’t think...and generally rely upon someone else to think for them.
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