During today’s meeting for CUARS (Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools), someone had mentioned the reports on how students through their second year of college do not “learn” anything and on how the typical student spends at most 12 hours studying, which is about half the recommended amount. I could think of numerous reasons why this would be the case. For myself, the amount of time spent on extracurricular activities (and less-than-stellar time management) would account for why I don’t have as much time to study as I should. Yet, thinking about the core reasons why students today are not performing academically, I cannot help but look to K-12 education. Surely, current economic and budgetary problems in higher ed have made for a diminished quality of education, but the problem of not finding academic success in college does not start only once a student sets foot on a university campus; in many ways it really begins during the steps before this. Students are not learning because for most students, they’ve never really been given the opportunity to really learn anything in the first place. If ‘learning’ in the truest sense of the term is to be taken as critically taking in information and integrating it into one’s native logic and intelligence, then this is not the case for students in our current K-12 system. Right now, primary and secondary education is structured to facilitate a very undemocratic, uncritical way of learning, in which students are simply banked lessons and concepts that have been deemed “standard” for the purpose of regurgitation on a standardized test. In reality, the success one has on standardized testing is in no way a measure of how she or he does in college. How are students expected to be thoughtful and analytical in their college courses when all they have been taught to do is to indiscriminately cram information into their head and later spit it out? As for the statistics on study time, most students before they reach college have developed the ability to procrastinate; after all, it’s pretty easy to take in concepts when you’re basically going to empty it out onto a test and forget about it entirely. Overall, from grade school onward, students like myself have been denied the chance to have a relevant, thoughtful education, and we pay the price for it when we get to college.
(Should have said this today, and I think I will when we meet again.)
