“I Facebook through most of my classes.” “I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me.” “My neighbor paid for class… but never comes.” These are just a few of the candid admissions made by 200 students at Kansas State University in 2007 when their professor, Michael Wesch, asked them to put together a video (A Vision of Students Today) expressing how they felt about their college education. The consensus was that, in addition to being a huge inconvenience, the experience is impersonal, trying, and mostly irrelevant.
Over a year after it appeared on YouTube, Wesch revisited the popular and controversial video (nearly 4 million views to date) and wrote up his conclusions for an Encyclopedia Britannica blog series called Brave New Classroom 2.0. In what’s becoming a standard argument against traditional, “place-based” education, he runs down the now familiar shaky premises and fuzzy conclusions.
Mindless Chairs Make Mindless Students
Wesch starts off by opining that the “disengagement” exhibited by the students in the video is “built into [the walls]” of the classroom, which he describes as “nothing less than a state of the art information dump… built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information.” He waxes poetic about showing up to class on the first day of school and “finding 493 empty numbered chairs sitting mindlessly fixated on the front of the room.”
Chairs can’t be mindless, of course, nor can they fixate, but the bad metaphor is important. He doesn’t want to blame the students—or their parents and teachers, as well as administrators and public officials—for the collective failings of our educational system, so he blames what he sees as the archaic cultural attitudes that gave rise to and sustain the system:
Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.
If I’m reading this correctly, the internet—I assume that’s what he means by “a cloud of ubiquitous information”—has essentially stripped teachers of their authority, both as experts in particular areas of knowledge and as propagators and cultivators of that knowledge. They are no longer teachers, really—they are, in the lingo, moderators of learning environments. It’s all very progressive, I’m sure, but it’s worrisome to me that Wesch, as a teacher, really believes that classrooms exist solely to convey information, whereas the internet is a loftier space where “knowledge is made.”
It’s worrisome because he’s wrong. Knowledge can be “made” anywhere, including the classroom, especially in the classroom, assuming the participants include a good teacher and students who want to learn. And this is true of students of all grades, not just the lucky ones who make it into college (most of whom, I hope, have the good grace and humility not to whinge about their good fortune). That the Net is somehow more attuned to the pursuit of knowledge than to the pursuit of, say, porn or box scores is a common misconception among moderators of learning environments.
Those Who Can, Learn; Those Who Can’t, Facebook
So now that we know the modern university is inherently incompatible with the learning process in this liberated new age of boundless information, what do we do about apathetic students who positively abhor the “stale artificial environments” we force upon them?
We don’t have to tear the walls down. We just have to stop pretending that the walls separate us from the world, and begin working with students in the pursuit of answers to real and relevant questions.
I’m all for not pretending that we can’t move through metaphorical walls, but what does this amount to practically? What are these real and relevant questions we should be asking, and do they involve history and mathematics and biology and English composition? Or is there a new slate of subjects we should be teaching (moderating)? Or is the whole concept of the academic subject no longer viable? And what do we do, if anything, about students Facebooking during class? For Wesch, once we stop denying that “the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted,”
We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities.
But how might we begin to do this? I agree with him that “texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class,” and that they aren’t really the problem. But that doesn’t make them the solution. Second only to experience, the most powerful learning technology in the world is a teacher, despite the low esteem Wesch seems to hold for his already institutionally undervalued profession.
Blaming disengaged students on school is like blaming a disengaged citizenry on democracy. A classroom is not a prison, but a privilege.
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