About twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I taught a lesson in a special room for observation in the training center of my university. My students and I sat at a long oval table, while the cameras recorded us. I can’t remember what kind of romance we discussed, but I know what I found out when I looked at the film, with a training coach. She pointed out that when I called the students, I often looked right, letting the raised hands on the left. I did not allow silence to continue long enough, instead, when the student gained courage to talk. On the other hand, she noticed that I used the technique that she liked, which I borrowed from my professor: it was like cold, with the exception that after you surprised the student with a difficult question, you told them that you cross them in a few minutes to give them time to think about what they would say. This, she told me, was a “warm challenge.”
Teaching was my favorite part of the graduate school, and I signed as for as much training as I could. While I taught or otherwise focused on students, my role in the higher education project made sense for me: I spent years studying literature so that I could explain this to students who wanted to better. Outside the class, however, the company was darker. I knew that it really was important for my professional promotion, was an academic research. My teaching skills were mostly irrelevant. In fact, I was warned that training was a distraction from the “real work” of writing articles for my peers.
Sometimes it seemed that the course work was distracting for my students. Despite the fact that they were serious and diligent, they were often so immersed in extracurricular activities – sales efforts, music groups, sports, and startups – that they struggled to find time to study. I myself was part of the startup as a senior student, and was familiar with the main logic that controls the extracurricular excess: the inflation of classes, which allowed mediocre students to perform less work, also made it difficult to distinguish themselves academically. All incentives, both for teachers and for students, are encouraged to do less in the classroom and more beyond.
These contradictions were not amazing; They reflected the complex nature of the modern university, in which the pedagogy of undergraduate is only one of several competing priorities. In fact, the implicit theory was that students find out that they could be from higher researchers of the university, some of whom were brilliant teachers, and some are not. Some classes would be difficult, others are ridiculous easily; Estimates will be evenly high; And, in any case, there would be something to do out of class. It would be a direction to be next to such a large number of wonderful minds. When training did not occur as a result of training, this will happen through Osmos.
Was this theory convincing? Twenty years ago it seemed – but today the gears could no longer be introduced. Student debt became a burden of generations when tens of millions of people received federal loans for a degree. At the same time, the college seems to have become much easier, which indicates a decrease in its main functions. IN “Amateur hour: College Teaching History in America“The scientist by education Jonathan Zimmerman notes that in 2011, about forty -three percent of the college of writing were the same as; A AtlanticRosa Gorouich reportS, that in 2024 the average score of the Harvard graduation class was 3.8.) For about the same period, “the average amount of training of people in college decreased by almost 50 percent, from 25 to 13 hours a week.” Zimmerman leads to the conclusion of the survey that in one semester half of the respondents from a wide range of institutions did not take a single course that demanded to write more than twenty pages, in total.
This is still the case when college graduates, as a rule, become higher earnings. Nevertheless, the most new data show that people with four -year degrees are now trying to find a job. Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, can soon change work in various fields; Many popular college specialists, such as marketing, can be less valuable than they before. When AI is used by students, he also threatens to turn a classroom into a theater in which an act of learning is imitated. Students can have a chat -bots that work for them, teachers can give this work of bloated assessments, and everyone can feel good, he studies very little. “There is a mutually coordinated mediocrity between students and teachers and an administrative teacher,” explains People's Singer Jesse Wells in her song “College. “You pretend to be trying, they pretend that you have earned an assessment.” If you want to be a doctor or an engineer, Wells sings, the college can cost him;
From the middle of the last century, the number of Americans in college has increased significantly – in an unprocessed amount, which is about five. This development seemed inevitable, due to the growth of work on knowledge and the discovery of higher education for once out of operated groups. And yet, in the last decade, the enrollment began to decline, and it is expected that this reduction will continue. Demography is a potential factor: a decrease in the birth rate, which began around 2007, is predicted, which will lead to a smaller number of high school students. But it also seems possible that more and more people come to the conclusion that the college has changed and does not cost. Universities are trying their best to seem eternal, but higher education is the industry, like any other, with its share of take -off and falls. If the college is a bubble, can it prepare for a break?
“Academics were the main event in college, surrounded by many side shows,” Zimmerman told me when I recently spoke with him. “Now the main event may be the main event.” Even well -intentioned, well -resource universities tried their best to stop this shift, and Zimmerman finds the roots of the problem in the history of teaching an American college. He begins with Mark Hopkins, a professor of philosophy, who was president of Williams college from 1836 to 1872. If Socrates. Invented a seminarHopkins was his American emissar: at a time when education was often held with the help of large lectures, and through reading he brought students to talk about the importance of life. “The perfect college is Mark Hopkins on one end of the log, and on the other hand,” James A. Garfield, who was one of his students, later said. This idea was Lodestar for teachers, writes Zimmerman, who came to understand the teaching of the college as a “charismatic” activity, which depends mainly on the personal vigor of professors.
There are good reasons to keep this point of view. A gifted teacher can change your life; curriculum bureaucracy It is unlikely. As the K-12 teachers know, administrative supervision of the curriculum is fraught with procedural and political dangers. Colleges, Tsimmerman shows, passed this territory, remaining faithful to Garfield's vision. By the decade, for a decade, they have become larger and more institutionally complex, with a block -schemes full of vice -rectors, but since “more and more American higher education were subjected to a bureaucratic umbrella, the teaching mainly remained outside of it.” Today, administrators micro -rule each aspect of life in college, but the design and implementation of the course work remain mainly a private issue for individual professors who can solve themselves.
