During a class discussion a few years ago, a student struggled out loud with the many demands of college life: classes, work, parents, romance, friends, clubs, sports, and other obligations. âI just canât make it all work,â she said with exasperation and the beginning of a few tears in her eyes. This was a capstone seminar for senior undergraduate psychology majors. The topic on the floor was time management, and this student expressed how hard it was for her to balance getting schoolwork done along with all the other things she wanted and needed to do. Another student piped up to counsel her, âLook, donât let school interfere with your education.â These words from Mark Twain seemed to elicit near universal agreement from the class. âOf course,â they agreed, âthe really important learning in college takes place outside the classroom. Donât ever forget that.â
Lest we think this scenario is an anecdotal blip, 70 % of college students say that âsocialâ learning outside the classroom is more important than academic learning (Grigsby, 2009). It is not only students who think this way. The famous psychologist Carl Rogers said of his career in teaching, âIt seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behaviorâ (1969, p. 302). These sentiments remind me of what my uncle used to say over the Thanksgiving table to needle me: âThose who can, do; those who canât, teach.â
In this day of online classes and âdistant learningâ platforms, is the living, breathing teacher necessary at all? What can college students learn in a classroom, face-to-face with a skilled teacher they cannot learn anywhere else? Some have argued the answer is âskills and informationâ (see Craig, 2015; Hettich, 1998). Indeed, there has been great pressure from legislators, administrators, students, and other stakeholders to have higher education be ârelevant,â to show that learning really produces concrete results in the world in terms of obtaining employment, earning higher incomes, and acquiring âreal worldâ job competencies. As a result, the past 25 years have witnessed a wholesale transformation of the teaching profession into an activity focused primarily on the transfer of relevant skills and information to students.
What is ironic is that this lurch toward relevance and applicability actually puts the professor on the path of the Dodo Bird. A colleague of mine has a picture on his office door of a professor standing before a classroom. Below it the caption reads, âDead Man Talking.â The scenario is not that far from being a reality. Once teaching becomes about skills and information, it can just as easily be âput online.â It strikes many as absurd that we havenât already put college completely online (e.g., Carey, 2015; Crow & Dabars, 2015; Selingo, 2015). I actually agree with these critics: if higher education is really about skills and information, then it should all be put online. Students should not be asked to waste their time driving to campus and sitting through face-to-face classes if they can just as easily acquire them by a cheaper and more efficient means. But what I will try to show in this book is that higher education is not at all about acquiring skills and information.
I return to the Twain quote, âDonât let school interfere with your education.â I tend to think that any popular idea like this must have at least a kernel of truth in it. This view of education appreciates that for learning to matter, it needs to be useful to the learner. It needs to pertain to and even be derived from âthe real worldâ rather than be a set of abstract principles that apply to nothing. It needs to be something we achieve through our own efforts rather than be âgivenâ to us by a teacher in a classroom. But this view misses other vitally important facets of learning, what we might think of as the deeper aspects of education. Deep learning aims to develop higher order and critical thinking in the learner, to help the student see the underlying assumptions behind claims to knowledge, to be able to evaluate those assumptions, and consider better ones. Deep learning seeks to enable students to logically reason from premises to valid conclusions or to induce othersâ premises from listening and careful observation. Deep learning teaches students to engage in thoughtful, persuasive speech and writing, to go out into the world and be able to really know and understand it to its core. Deep learning seeks to develop the young human beingâs mind to be able to live a meaningful life and productively engage the franchise of democratic citizenship. The important point is that for deep learning to happen, it requires an intimate and interpersonal learning community. These things cannot be taught or learned online. And one does not just pick these things up from oneâs family, friends, and social life. One does not acquire them from working in or running a business. One can only learn these things in a classroom from a teacher who already has these abilities himself or herself and who knows how to construct scenarios for students to learn and rehearse them.
My practice in this book is to pose questions about the role of the teacher to the ancient figure Socrates. Socrates devoted his entire life to teaching and was even willing to die for what he saw as the noblest of all vocations, one which he thought required more strength and courage than the soldier and more practical intelligence than the businessman. In the dialogue Ion, Socrates speaks with the famous rhapsode Ion. A rhapsode is a minstrel of sorts who gives oral recitals of the great poet Homer. These figures were quite esteemed in ancient Greece. Given the adulation he has enjoyed, Ion is quite convinced he is the greatest rhapsode who ever lived. Always taken aback by displays of self-confidence, Socrates is determined to find out what this young man knows which leads him to his bluster.
In conducting this investigation through dialogue with Ion, Socrates introduces a distinction between an art (techne) and its purpose (ergon). The purpose of the art of medicine, he says, is health. The purpose of the art of farming is food. The purpose of the art of carpentry is furniture. The skilled practitioner of any art, Socrates maintains, has not only technical skill, but also an intimate knowledge of the overall purpose of the art, where the art is supposed to lead. The practitioner uses this knowledge of the end point to guide his or her specific actions while practicing the art. Socrates tells Ion, since you are such a good practitioner of the art of rhapsody, I assume you must also be conversant with its ergon. So what, Socrates asks him, is the purpose of the art of rhapsody?
Ion mumbles, fumbles, and has an overall great deal of difficulty articulating what the purpose of his art is. He answers, does it even need to have a purpose? Canât my art just be for artâs sake? Socrates is perplexed. Practitioners of any art should at least be able to provide an account (logos) of the goal of their craft. Otherwise, they are just blindly doing things, uncritically applying skills they have learned from their own teachers. Socrates tries to engage Ion further. He asks Ion to consider his own profession: teaching. He asks Ion, what is the purpose of Dialectical teaching, the philosopherâs art? Is it fame? Esteem? Is it accomplished students who have productive careers? No, Socrates answers before Ion even has a chance to reply. It is none of these things. As the carpenterâs art produces furniture, Socrates argues, the teacherâs art produces knowledge. The good teacher knows he or she is practiced in the art of teaching if their instruction facilitates knowledge in the student. Socrates here introduces two very important concepts for this book: knowledge and Dialectic. My book is based entirely on these two concepts. I believe that if we can understand these two ideas, we can grasp the whole Socratic enterprise and will better understand what teaching is all about. I will try to thoroughly explain both in the pages that follow. I look first at knowledge.
Learning Outcomes: The Modern Equivalent of Wisdom
Socrates defines âknowledgeâ as the condition in which a mind apprehends the truth about a subject. He puts it more poetically in the Republic: knowledge is the condition in which a soul has been âturned toward the lightâ (518c). Socrates calls this state of knowledge âwisdomâ (Phaedo, 79c). In this book, I refer to wisdom as âreal knowledge.â In modern parlance, we often prefer to speak of âlearning outcomesâ rather than âwisdomâ or âknowledge,â but the meaning is basically the same. Todayâs schools and academic programs are often required to give an account of the âknowledgeâ they seek to develop in their students. This is a good thing. Imagine if teachers did not do this. We would be like Ion, practitioners of an art whose purpose we did not really understand. These learning outcomes are posted on school websites and printed in brochures and syllabi.
Even in our virtual age of online degrees and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), when you review these posted outcomes, most academic programs still aspire to humane, liberal arts goals: self-knowledge and moral awareness in students, critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creative problem solving, and coherent writing. These are goals Socrates would embrace. Not even at the most rapacious, for-profit, or vocationally oriented school would you see a published learning outcome which sought to help students seek advantage over others in argument, or to manipulate others with their words, to accept expert opinion passively, to earn as much money as possible. No, even in our much more virtual and business-oriented age, most schools still seek to develop knowledge and wisdom in the human person. This is to be celebrated.
While higher education aspires to a lofty set of learning outcomes, the question is, how well is it achieving them? The picture doesnât look good. Recent measures of undergraduatesâ ability to think critically, reason analytically, solve problems, and write show no statistically significant gains for half of all college students even after four years of college (Arum & Roksa, 2011, p. 35). For the half of students who had some positive effects, the gains fell between seven and ten percentage points. I want to stand back and really let that sink in: for almost half of all students, a college degree has had no measurable impact in terms of the schoolâs own humane learning outcomes. For the other half, the impact is negligible. If true, this should alarm those of us who spend time teaching these poor souls!
A number of other sobering reports on the quality of undergraduate education in the USA were recently released. Derek Bok, who served as Harvard University president from 1971 to 1991, wrote a book entitled Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (2006). He concluded that many students graduate from the most elite colleges without being able to write well enough to satisfy the minimal demands of their employers, without being able to reason clearly in thinking through problems, and without even the basic skills in exercising their franchise of democratic citizenship. Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow paint a similar picture in less competitive colleges and universities in their book, Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (2006).
Over the course of my own 25-year teaching career, I have personally witnessed this decline in critical thinking, analytical ability, reading comprehension, speaking, writing, and even civil behavior. Why is this happening? The answer is a complex one for sure. There are large cultural, philosophical, and educational forces which together work to impede the humane knowledge project: smart phones and social media (see Bauerlein, 2009; Grigsby, 2009; Postman, 1985; Turkle, 2015), increasingly large classes, scantron pedagogy, along with rigorous tenure and promotion standards which incentivize grant writing, research, and publication over teaching, preparing for class, and grading papers.
Our elementary, middle, and high schools share some of the blame as well. An increasing number of students each year begin college unprepared, with poor study skills, and eventually become part of a non-academic college culture in which students spend less time studyin...