Curiosity, "Higher" Education, Leading a Horse to Water, and Job Security
My elitist opinion is that true higher education is, or was, designed for the few natural scholars amongst us for whom curiosity and "thinking about stuff" is a driving force. When a college degree becomes a job credential, that meaning and that purpose is lost. The idea of universal college education must, of necessity, degrade it's meaning, and it begins to be a few more years of insanely expensive high school except in the most competitive institutions, or for the wonderful but unusual nerdy student-scholars who Want To Learn Things. Having just heard a series of informal, highly enthusiastic lectures from a Georgetown kid in the Uffizi about Cimabue, Duccio and Giotto, I am not ready to despair yet: some "get it," and many do not.
From a piece by Zane:
"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said. "But it was disheartening to see that some couldn't even go to the trouble of finding out the name of the person teaching the course."
The floodgates were opened and the other UNC professors at the dinner began sharing their own dispiriting stories about the troubling state of curiosity on campus. Their experiences echoed the complaints voiced by many of my book reviewers who teach at some of the nation's best schools.
All of them have noted that such ignorance isn't new -- students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, "It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."
Read entire.
