My So-Called Education?

Finals are fast approaching, and that means one thing: more procrastination, more Netflix, and more internet surfing. Just kidding, Mom.

While doing so, I did come across this article, which rehashes an idea that has been floating around the ideosphere for a while: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?_r=1

First of all, a snarkier title there could not be. My “so-called education”? NYtimes, you don’t know my life.

It’s interesting to think about this from an English major’s point of view, however. Whenever I’ve been told that my major isn’t “real”, whatever that means, the critic usually points to the fact that my classwork isn’t quantifiable. I can’t hold up x number of problem sets and say, “Look, I’m a big girl now!” Instead all I have are papers that most people don’t necessarily find interesting (unless they really care about The Canterbury Tales, I guess, or maybe whether anthropomorphism can ever be anything but anthropocentric. Did I lose you?)

My major requirements are, to many people, disconcertingly vague (take at least one class focused on British literature and one class centered on the study of poetry, etc.) while math and science majors have reassuring sequences. In other majors, there is a way of definitely knowing whether you are “better” than someone else. Answers are usually right or wrong (NOT, for example, “a good start but perhaps if you delved deeper into ways in which Chaucer problematizes the ethos of pure violence, you might arrive at a clearer analysis…”). You can turn to someone and say, “I’m in Math 203”, which is by most standards definitively higher and harder than Math 202. Whereas someone in “Chinese Literature of the 20^th Century” can’t say they’ve advanced beyond someone in “Reading and Roadtripping”

The NYtimes article raises the possibility that students use their four (more or less) precious undergrad years just generally dicking around and not learning anything. The assertion that there are people who only spend 12 hours on schoolwork a week is, I’m sure, shocking to us UChicago students who live in the Reg. People can take courses with less than 40 pages of reading a week?

Some of us are fortunate enough to go to colleges that still prize academics over fancy amenities. I, for example, read almost 300 pages a week and live in a building with rats and no air-conditioning. I’m sure many of my friends would agree that at least here at the U of C, there’s no lack of academic rigor. Yet.

However, the article does raise some pertinent questions, even for our hallowed institution. The point about teacher evaluations is, for example, quite relevant. A friend of mine has raged more than once about the flaws in the teacher evaluation system, which includes questions designed to steer students towards easier classes with less work. Practically speaking, most students do pay attention to those qualifications—but this system still, as NYtimes puts it, creates “incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades”.

The core at this University (and at other universities) raises other concerns. I have certainly felt like my time was being wasted as I sat in a physical sciences class, along with about a hundred other students, learning that water comes in three phases. (No joke, this information was actually presented as part of a lecture.) Is it really necessary to force students to take both humanities and social sciences, civilization studies, biology, and physical sciences? I understand the argument that familiarity with some thinkers (Marx, Smith, Foucault, etc.) is considered necessary to get on as an intellectual in this world. But is Core Biology really going to be useful to an English major? Or an Economics major, for that matter? Core classes do not explore the depth necessary to really know a subject, and they rarely cover ground that is truly new and exciting. Instead, they skim the surface of an impossibly broad topic, forcing students to do a lot of busy-work in exchange for little real learning. And yes, even non-writing-based majors should know how to craft a well-argued paper, but does that really require seven quarters of humanities, social sciences, and civ? It seems that time could be better spent learning more relevant information, or taking more focused classes.

What do you think? Are you actually learning anything at college? (Hopefully you’re learning something…)

A lesson.

I recently had an interesting conversation with my boss at Kumon, a math and reading tutoring center that in my native Ohio is a hotbed of overachieving Indian and Asian kids. However, here in Chicago, the second-story suite at 55^th and Lake Park paints a very different picture.

You can feel the desperation in the waiting room. Parents whose children are in seventh grade and can’t do addition yet flip aimlessly through the magazines that my boss leaves out there randomly (we boast a copy of Skymall from 2000…). These are not the parents who form our friend circle in Dayton. They range from high school dropouts to high-powered lawyers, all crammed in this airless room that smells of our janitor’s unwashed hair, craning their necks to see what I’m teaching their children. They need this center, and this center needs them—my boss admitted that he loses about half of his students every year at December (though it’s yet to happen this year), perhaps because parents can’t keep up with the tuition (around $100 per subject per month). Then again, what choice do they have now?

It was Sunday, and I was sitting in front of the center’s tired Toshiba laptop, typing in test scores because my boss still insists on using paper records instead of cutting out that middle step. I don’t complain. Actually I do, endlessly, but never to his face.

While browsing his emails for him, I noticed that one of his Chrome tabs was open to the recently published article on Shanghai’s PISA scores. As some of you may know, China recently entered the international standardized-testing ring. The New York Times basically shit its pants over how high the Shanghai test scores were—although why that should be surprising, I have no idea. I mean, what are Asian kids known for, besides being whizzes at math and piano? I may be the only known exception on Earth.

Anyway, my boss and I got into a discussion of the current educational system in America, which I’ve become fascinated with ever since I started working here. I mean, we’re tutoring this woman who’s going to take the Illinois teaching exam for the third time, and she can’t answer the question:

“What percent of 36 is 30?”

(Incidentally, an English major at UChicago told me laughingly that she wasn’t even sure she’d be able to do that, which…didn’t quite make me laugh.)

America currently ranks around 30^th in the world in reading and math, and yet some of my peers don’t see much reason to be very concerned. People crow about American innovation, without realizing that people down the street from them have children who are thirteen and can’t yet read a picture book. What can we do? We read about all the latest gimmicks, school districts complaining that they can’t teach because they don’t have the latest computer system. But I think it goes deeper than that.

We need a change in cultural perspective before anything else. There are many things wrong with the Chinese system, and I’ll be the first to admit it, but the one lesson that Americans should take from this might be the Chinese “culture of education”, as the Times put it. China has long placed emphasis on filial duty and respect for elders, so that children think of teachers as people who actually have something to teach them. There’s no complaining about students being “overworked” or “pressured” just because they have two quizzes in one day—successful students in China recognize that they are just that: students. Education is the focus, and as a result, Chinese students are on the rise in the world. Although American universities are still on top and still attract the highest caliber of students from around the world, the day is coming when other nations will have the resources to challenge American universities. Already, we see an increased number of international students leaving America after school to return to their native countries, taking their new skills back with them.

Of course, respect for teachers goes hand in hand with all of this. The woman who can’t figure percents is admirable for wanting to go into the teaching, but that doesn’t mean she should be allowed to. In all likelihood, she will eventually pass the test—with tutors holding her hand every step of the way. 

What’s going to happen when she faces a classroom of seventh graders, most of whom do math at the 4^th grade level?

We need to make the teaching profession what it ought to be: a respected calling, with pay that corresponds to the hard work good teachers put in. It’s almost criminal that people who get up at 5 in the morning every day to shape America’s future barely make enough to be considered middle class. Of course, I may be biased, being the daughter of two professors. But I’ve seen and experienced firsthand what a difference good teachers can make, and how far we can be set back by mediocre ones.

My boss asked me whether I think what made America great still lingers in its soil and its people. In his opinion, if we can reach back to our roots, we can remain on top forever, and I agree. But if we don’t adjust soon, we lose that chance. So what exactly was it that made this country the beautiful place it is today? How can we fight the double-edged sword of complacent arrogance and helplessness in the face of our educational problems? We owe it to ourselves to think this over.