A Well Rounded Student...Not With Contemporary Schooling

It was in an early scene from The Hunt for Red October, as I recall, when during an instant preparation for a rushed meeting with the Vice President and the assembled national security team, Jack Ryan's superior, friend and mentor, Admiral James Greer, asks him to: “Tell them [the national security team] what you think.” During that and other Jack Ryan narratives, Tom Clancy draws a distinction between “what you think” and “what you know.” “What you think” calls for an informed evaluation, interpretation and conclusion of the available material under consideration which is based on the analyst’s three “higher level” cognitive functions of analysis, synthesis and generalization as well as on the mastery of concisely and cogently conveying the result of the active blending of them through speech, writing or other symbolic form to an audience, whether it be an audience of one or many. “What you know” essentially calls on the analyst to ready recall memorized data points to be quickly imparted through whatever symbolic form to one or many. Competently responding to these questions relies on individuals being that well-rounded human American schooling has for hundreds of years said was its greatest purpose. 

 

Indeed, the cognitive aspect of the “well rounded student”, I'd argue, is defined by the continued cultivation in both what you think and what you know. In fact, it is the application of a select blending of highly developing analysis, synthesis, generalization and ready recall memorization to any question under consideration and, simultaneously, of precisely conveying the resultant meanings in a symbolic form appropriate to situation. Notice, the definition of the cognitive aspect in being well rounded has nothing at all to do with the demonstration of academic subject or general knowledge content. Rather it has all to do with what is commonly referred to as Critical Thinking and Communication.

But notice, also, that the developed cognitive aspect is only one part of what it means to be well rounded. I submit that the maturing emotional and social aspects of a person compose the other necessary characteristics on which formal education work. Thus, being a well rounded student, being a well-rounded human, ought to mean as well the development of a well adjusted psycho-dynamic and the cultivation of social competency.

As a professor of undergraduates, I have had to engage the consequences of the shaping affects of Kindergarten through Twelfth grade schooling and I have also been witness to the cognitive, emotional and social effects of undergraduate education. And I have seen how not so well rounded undergraduates are, even those on the precipice of graduation. My participation in the undergraduate exercise has brought me to say that: 1) schooling exercises all three aspects of personality but in a way molding youngsters' psyches and consequent behaviors to as easily as possible enter, move through and out of school organizations; 2) by elevating people movement in-through-and-out as the key function of schooling, the cognitive, emotional and social growth goals of well-roundedness are selectively modified to the demands of transportation through organizational systems; 3) all youngsters falling outside of the parameters enabling ease of movement through education systems are deemed to have learning disabilities; 4) the highest functioning movers through the system are rewarded with high status school graduation with its concomitant monetary class awards, the others, especially those with learning disabilities, are punished with low school status and its concomitant monetary class penalties; 5) when, especially, the highest functioning movers are expected to demonstrate openness to cognitive, emotional and social growth toward well-roundedness, a dissonance is created in them which all too often is resolved in the direction of prior socialization with a concomitant emotional resistance and rebellion;  6) when the lower functioning movers are expected to demonstrate openness to cognitive, emotional and social growth toward well-roundedness, an equal dissonance is created in them which like their high functioning counterparts is resolved in the direction of prior socialization with a concomitant emotional resistance and rebellion; and 7) student social-emotional support and intervention is always meant to bring those having trouble adjusting from their native other than easy transportation acuities to align with those well suited to easy movement through and out of the schooling system.

In other words, contemporary schooling may in the end produce well adapted organizational people, but it does not, it cannot, yield the well-roundedness in the sense argued here. Further, I'd argue, the greater the demand for the uniform subject content mastery-as is the case with the Common Core Curriculum for elementary and high schools and the Core/Elective course curriculum in college-rather then on optimal growth of the individuals' cognitive processes themselves, the greater the emotional demands schooling makes to adhere to formal rules and informal culture of obedience to school authority instead of normed appropriate situational behavior and the greater the pressure on youngsters to maintain a perfect symmetry of interpersonal behavior to create absolute order in the school building and classroom instead of actualizing the rambunctiousness from the clashes of evolutionary energized youth, the greater the distance there is between the organizational human and the well-rounded one. And for those like myself, who truly believe in the ultimate goal of a well-rounded human as a consequence of formal education, well, we are forced to either go along as good organizational folks do or leave to the margins of the education business. And as I appear to resolve the dissonance by adhering to my own form of socialization, I accept going to the margins. But, the margins hold no wages, and thus, I keep on finding myself further and further “between appointments.”

But, you know, during the 1980's I witnessed young adults willing to move in the direction of being well-rounded, the way I mean it.

The Lecture as a Terrible College Classroom Tradition

Pre-Service professors are taught the content of their discipline and the research methods common to their discipline.  This makes sense as the primary career objective and the basis of employment in the professorate is published research in the discipline.  In fact, the value of professors is marked not by the quality of their teaching as by the degree of published reputation they bring to a school and the amount of research grant money they can generate for the school.   The former instance draws paying students and donors and the latter brings in additional hard cash.  Please to remember that first and foremost colleges and universities are business which in order to do education must be more than financially solvent. 

From the professors point of view, the research published in academic journals, where almost all research is published, is uncompensated, other than, if you wish, the prospect of obtaining and retaining employment and advancing in rank.  Books published yield little direct monetary compensation beyond reputation, which has a definite value in the publish or perish world of higher education but by itself cannot pay the bills.

With employment so keyed to uncompensated published research, teaching becomes the payable excuse to have professsors on the payroll without having to actually pay for their researching and for their research. It is quite understandable, then, that the preparation for employment in the professorate must concentrate on research methods in publishable areas of the discipline, but it is a wonder that there is a lack of actual teaching preparation.  Some “education” course work is undertaken acquainting prospective professors with the general history and sociology of the field and with a survey of learning theory and human development.  But actual methods are left unconsidered. 

Thus, when new professors begin to teach, they replicate the way they were taught largely without reflection on these processes.  As long as the newly minted are within the pedagogical cocoon formed by the consensus practices of their departmental and school colleagues, there is no need for them to delve into practice.  There is no need to fully understand what is being done in the classroom, what is actually happening to the cognitive development of students as content mastery is being accomplished-and what is happening in content mastery focused learning in the first place. 


The result of all this is for new faculty to fall into line with The Lecture as not only the predominant means of teaching, but the only way of teaching.  They were lectured course after course when they were students and thus they continue to lecture course after course when they teach.  Further, Deans and departmental Chairs, themselves "lecturers" are quite comfortable insisting on it.

As it turns out, the lecture is the easiest teaching method.  Lecturing essentially is teacher talk to students where the teacher having notated a selection of text beforehand places his/her notes on a board and explains their significance while students place the bored notes into copy books for later memorization. The talking to is then re-enforced through teacher selected text readings.  This process continues for a time and then the professor announces a test of the material placed on board and in notebooks and taken from the readings. 

The genius of this method rests in two facts:  1) students are relieved of most of the need to grow cognitive capacities; and 2) courses can saturate students with vast amounts of information. 

Lecturing provides students with extracted information the professor deems important focusing student attention on the isolated data point rather than on its meaning and implications to the contexts from which the data point was drawn.  Thus, learning here is limited to the memorization of the data point.  However, cognition grows not with the memorization of the data point alone but with the expansion in the ability to synthesize newly taken-in information with previously held to form an understanding of relationships between the data point and its context as well as the relationships between other data points and their contexts.  Memorization of data points by itself just is not able to grow cognition, but then the goal of the exercise in content mastery, the overarching and singular goal of college courses, is in the best memorization of as many data points as possible.  When I eventually took methods courses in preparation for high school teaching, I was instructed that content mastery, i.e. competency with any material, is defined as eighty percent correct on whatever exam is testing the learning of that material, that is, testing the memorization of data points.  And that is the case with higher education as well.

And as for piling it on, well, a professor can load it up if all he/she has to do is to talk to students.  Even if given a fifty minute period, which translates into forty teaching minutes, a professor can place data point after data point on the board even if writing slowly.  But, with the use of technology, first with overhead projectors and now with smart boards, the need for writing has ended with the result that even more data points can be presented to students. 

More and more one finds in the technological classroom there is less and less need for students to take notes as the teacher has already prepared notes for the smart board which he/she can easily duplicate and distribute.  On the one hand this relieves students of trying to actively listen and copy simultaneously, too frequently resulting in missed explanations or mistaken understanding of information, but on the other hand note-taking done right necessitates first understanding the points made by the professor which then is affixed in the students’ own way on notebook paper which results in a deeper understanding of the material under study.   Either way, with lecturing piling on data points and reading covering even more, students are overwhelmed by information with their minds only having sufficient capacity to memorize rather than to memorize and synthesize.  Consequently, I'd argue, contemporary lecturing cognitively stagnates students rather than growing them.  It has always struck me that the overall objective of higher education is in the realm of cognitive growth, in cultivating and maturing the reflective mind.   But, that is not on, especially at the undergraduate level.

Lecturing, then, is both the easiest teaching method and the least effective teaching method when the learning objective is cognitive growth and content mastery.  But since higher education is far more interested in faculty research than in teaching, it makes sense that the easiest road is taken as the easiest allows the simplest teaching/learning, data point collection, to predominate and by so doing gives time for the real job of the professor, research. Also, since lecturing relieves students of the struggles cognitive grow necessitates, it is the easiest teaching for students to handle.  However, students do struggle with the saturation of data points they have to memorize; still, taxing memorization capacities for most young adults is far and away more congenial than grappling with the ideas, concepts and propositions required for growing reflective capacities.

As lecturing is the consensus pedagogy for both professor and student year after year, it remains the pedagogy one copies and uses unquestioned throughout a professorial life.  In the end lecturing remains self-perpetuating.  However, my interest in teaching has always centered in the struggle to grow cognition, to move the minds of students.  Thus, lecturing was, for me, a pedagogy I did not embrace, a method only to be used sparingly if at all.  And this, as always, removed me from the consensus and placed me outside the cocoon.