Students to Blame for Our Failing Education System

            Who’s to blame for our failing education system? Students! That’s right, I said it—the thought that every college instructor ruminates. At the end of the term, it seems some of my students are dumber than when they started. They haven’t grown any dumber. I just got to know them.

            It seems many students have no useful purposes—perhaps beyond serving as an alternate food source. Why must Soylent only come in green, when stupidity comes in a rainbow! Before processing into victuals, lop off their heads and use the contents to fertilize the rainforest. Bye, bye, Global Warming!

            After considering such suggestions, you may be pondering my sanity. Don’t worry. I’m also pondering it. I’m one ill-formed argument about pot legalization away from a straight jacket. Just because you’re in favor of legalization, doesn’t mean you need to smoke it. Particularly when writing a paper! I can even smell it on that Word document you emailed me. The smell permeates from the sentence fragments, run-ons, and ill-constructed verb tenses. I use the term “verb tenses” nearly as loosely as you demonstrated it. Had I not opened the file, I wouldn’t have known what you were sending. At least you put your name on it this time. I know who to give the F.

            I know someone out there is thinking my suggestion constitutes murder. Apparently you haven’t seen the blank stares on my students’ faces. A lack of brain activity is one definition of death. How can you murder a corpse? I would be willing to offer pardons to students who asked thought-provoking questions; but, there would be rules. Any questions concerning matters covered in class more than twice are illegitimate. “Will this be on the test?” “Can we get extra credit?” And, “Can we get out of here early?” do not count as proof of brain activity. Any questions clearly covered in the syllabus will move a student to the front of the line. We’ll lop off the head right there—in class. Don’t worry, no one will even notice until the video goes viral. Several minutes later, some back-row cell phone jockey will loudly declare, “Dude! Did you just see what happened in class?”

            Now, those ill-informed of the realities of college classes, may suggest I’m simply boring. I’ve tried everything in class—lecture, discussion, videos, games, dancing, singing, and playing trombone. My bone playing is the auditory equivalent of waterboarding. It would jar consciousness from anyone with even the most modest sense of pitch. But in class, more blank stares!

            Some may wonder that if it’s fair for students, it’s also fair for instructors. Okay, then let’s go there! Imagine dragging highly educated professionals to the grinder? I’m guessing Soylent processing begins with a grinder, but what do I know? My degree work never included classes on meat processing. My degree work never included any information useful outside of academia. Why do you think I’m teaching these slackers!

            Upon further reflection, dragging instructors to the grinder seems ludicrous. Let them teach for ten years. You won’t need to drag. They’ll volunteer! They’ll march to the grinder with purpose. It’ll be the first time they’ve felt purpose in years. Yes, they used to be vibrant people—with ideas swimming in their heads, fire coursing through their hearts, and compassion dancing in their souls. The blank stares extinguished that. The blank stare isn’t a void; it’s a heaping helping of apathy! It’s a statement that the instructor isn’t viewed as a person. They are viewed as an obstacle between the student and the degree.

            We might as well kill students now. Their degrees are worthless. At most it’s a ticket to corporate serfdom. Used to be that serfdom was earned through a high school diploma. But, that was in the days when students worked hard and cared, so the diploma carried some weight. That was also in the days when companies cared—when employees were viewed as people and management had emotional attachment. Now, management is composed of MBA’s with blank stares. It’s the same stare that existed in the classroom, but now it’s at some profit and loss statement, where employees are seen as liabilities. These managers are the lucky few whose degrees served as golden tickets, only to find that Willy Wonka isn’t a fun loving chocolatier.  He’s a slick-talking politician with a bad toupee. And, the factory doesn’t produce chocolate. It produces Soylent in a rainbow of colors.

What is Wrong with Our Education System?

            The education system seems so huge, that it would seem impossible to simplify its problems into a short essay. But, while the system is huge, we can boil it down to individual students and teachers. There are certain truths of human nature. When these truths are grasped and applied—from both the teacher and student—then education begins to be transformed.

            True transformation is an inside-out process. Besides being involved in education, I’m also a born-again Christian. I’ve been around churches and church folks. In those circles, you will hear people talk of legalism. Legalism boils down to people whose whole perspective on their faith (and life) comes down to following a set of rules. Internally they are often dead, but outwardly they appear righteous.

            It’s frightening how closely this mirrors our education system. The system at its core is an external system of rewards and punishments that are designed to bring people into conformity. These rewards and punishments take the form of tests, papers, and other assignments, as well as rules, policies and procedures. Of course, some will argue that those things aren’t always wrong. No, they’re not always wrong. The issue is focus. When the externals become both a means and an end, and they have in many ways, people learn to play the game. Outwardly they conform, but inwardly they aren’t developing creativity or critical thinking. The ones most highly rewarded are the ones most conforming to the system.

            Think about those people who most changed society in a positive way, people like: Einstein, Beethoven or Shakespeare. What made these people unique wasn’t that they conformed. What made them unique was they did new things—or, perhaps old things in new ways. Uniqueness always comes from within. If we want to produce these type of people, our system must change from an outside-in to an inside-out focus.

            Grabbing the heart first. Grab a syllabus for a class or read a textbook. Ask yourself, is this person primarily focused on making a head-to-head connection? Or, is the primary focus on making a heart-to-heart connection? While there may be some exceptions, for the most part our system focuses on making a head-to-head connection.

            I can already hear some bureaucratic sighing, “Oh no! He’s another one of those liberal hippies who wants us all to have a group hug. Let’s make every child feel good, blah, blah, blah!” I don’t think we need to make everyone feel good. At times, anger can be a useful tool for teaching—particularly when a slacker student is pushed into the corner and comes out with an I’ll-show-them mentality. The truth is, we think about those things that impact us emotionally. The heart is the engine of the mind. Deep thinking without emotional engagement is virtually impossible.

            Individual teachers in the system do connect emotionally. But, the system as a whole is not designed for this. The system is designed around content when it should be designed around human nature!

            Detached from real world application. Academia is detached from real world applications. We divide things into artificial categories—Math, English or History. Problems outside the class are seldom chopped up into these little boxes. The classroom is such a detached environment. Kids don’t care about a train leaving Chicago at 60 mph and another train leaving Los Angeles at 45 mph. When will they meet? They do care about problems in their own neighborhood—like hunger, or crime or why there are people living underneath the bridge. This is particularly true when some of them are hungry or living underneath the bridge. People face problems everyday—problems they care deeply about and problems that will require applications of math, English, science, government and a whole host of other disciplines.

            The most detached people are often the ones at the top of the academic food chain—the tenured professors. The farther up the ladder they climb, the more specialized they become. Pretty soon the Ph.D. in education is no longer applying the dynamics of human nature in artistic ways in the class. He’s sitting in front of a computer screen, crunching numbers—boiling down something as complex as classroom interaction into a set of variables and looking for correlation and causation. And, with each number entered into the computer, he becomes a little more detached from the dynamics of the real world.

            Give them a big ugly problem. I see many students who lack the essential skills of creativity and critical thinking. I’ve asked myself the question over and over, “How do I teach those skills?” I keep coming up with the same answer. I need to give students a big ugly problem. It has to be a problem they don’t know how to solve. Then, I step back and let them struggle with it. And, I let them struggle some more. I let them work, work and work until they’ve either come up with a solution or they’ve exhausted all their resources. If they’ve exhausted all their resources, I give them a nudge—not much help, but just enough resources to continue the struggle. Then, I sit back and wait until they either solve the problem or exhaust all their resources. This process continues until they finally come up with a solution to the problem. This is how to teach creativity and critical thinking.

            Now, go ahead and try that with your average high school or college student. I dare you! Try it! The bitching, pissing and moaning from students will be unbearable. Some will complain to your supervisor. Some will just stare and you’ll feel their violent thoughts. Some will curl into the fetal position and stare out into space. Few will do the assignment. Most of their education up to this point has told them what to do and how to do it. It has given them answers instead of questions, and they simply don’t know how to handle the big ugly problem you just gave them.

            Most don’t know how to tap into their internal drives. Everything has taught them to follow externals, because the system is designed that way. They need to become emotionally engaged, because they need that fuel to think through and tackle the big ugly problem. This answers those who responded earlier in this essay by thinking, “Well, he just wants to engage people emotionally, so he can have a big group hug.” No, no, no! I want to engage people emotionally not to make them feel good. I want to engage them emotionally, because they’ll need that emotional engagement when I throw a big ugly problem in front of them. I don’t want fragile little flowers that wilt at the first sign of drought. I want people that when they’re pushed, they will push back—not in defiance or anger, but will push back by throwing their all into tackling the problem.

            I’m been teaching college over a decade and I’m in the process of working through my exit strategy. I can no longer play the game. I am a great teacher. But, I’m not going to keep working in a system that is in such utter ruins. I’ve tried to push students. They never push back. They deflect, manipulate and complain. And, students are often far more open to true education than administrators and bureaucrats—who are masters at deflecting, manipulating and blaming everyone but themselves. I believe the system is so sick, that it cannot be cured. A new system must be designed. All the problems in our system can be boiled down to one. Our education system doesn’t work, because it’s incongruent with human nature.