YOU NEED EXPERIENCE FOR THE JOB...

Irony comes in many shapes and guises. It was ironic that Galileo, a poor man with revolutionary views on the cosmos ended up vilified by elites who in their heyday claimed to be open to “intellectual” debate. It is ironic that we live in a globalizing age where a bomb that goes off in Cairo effects stock markets in a few seconds, yet most of us in our sadly gated communities couldn’t name our neighbors. It is also ironic in my view that blaming students for being unmotivated intellectually tends to come from faculty and administrators, in response as to why colleges have become dull intellectual places with lackluster international performance records.

So here is my view. Stop blaming the students so uncritically, and let’s start blaming the faculty. And let’s not set up a bogeyman of school boards that don’t seem to care, or City treasurers with a miserly grip on the coffers. Now here is how I ground this shift in finger pointing.

Firstly, it’s the faculty who set the curricula. It’s the faculty that develop their study guides, their tests, and run their classrooms. It’s the faculty that are largely control the monopoly on information in the classroom; after all, it’s none other than the professor that gives the A or the F. So let’s use common sense: it’s the faculty that deem ideas rational or not, correct or not, while they have their golden moments in the classroom. For all these reasons and more, I’m going to abandon the coquettishly fashionable view that sees the student as the captain of the college seaship. In my new view, it’s really the faculty that are captains of the vessel.

This is not an indictment against grades or homework. This is an indictment against those that find unmotivated students filling the classrooms. Faculty are stewards of the boat. If the students are unmotivated to learn, unmotivated intellectually, in my perspective, this results from faculty who are also equally unmotivated intellectually.

Now all finger pointing is only critical of me to say. We live in an era facing incredible economic pressures. We have a recession, a two-front war, a sliding value of the dollar, rising economic giants India and China, collapsing populations in the West and booming populations in the East. Perhaps students aren’t motivated intellectually nowadays because what’s being said in the classroom does not link the ideas on the chalkboard to the hard reality outside. It’s a question of priorities- while professors keep their paychecks and tenured status; students are being grinded through a mill that constantly reminds them of how unmotivated they all are.

If faculty had to face the same grim realities of a sunken labor market that would be one thing. However in my surmise, this is not true. If this were really true, then how it is time and again I meet students so completely oblivious; trying to live up to the stereotypical uncouth, ‘I don’t know why I’m here’ mystique of the college experience. I once blamed the students 100% for this, but not now. This happens because faculty, with their exalted ivory tower thrones, continually feed misinformation about what awaits students when they leave. “Study what you want, focus on what you enjoy,” or “look at the income earnings of college degrees overtime,” etc. A lot of times these statistics are so ambiguous it’s hard to directly refute, and why would we? It would be a tad unsettling to go to college and yet know the worth of your degree was questionable at best.

What this chipper viewpoint does is alter reality. See, great winners, like chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, good football teams, etc, grow in performance from training and studying victories AND failures, from knowing how they are weak and why. Its not a question of pessimism; its common sense. How often are we treated to statistics of college graduates stuck at Starbucks or McDonald’s for five years straight? Of MBAs living hand to mouth in a labor market that simply hasn’t provided the jobs? If I saw faculty alerting students to the bad as well as the good, this article would be unnecessary.

However I don’t see that happening and in such dark times it’s distressing. What is happening in effect is the mill is running young minds in on highly warped yet overly optimistic views on the economic realities facing them after graduation. This is a betrayal of a whole generation at work. So yes it is a question of priorities: do we ruffle the feathers of a Ph.d that hasn’t seen the unemployment lines stretching, or do we finally let go of this mystique of college as being a bastion where the unkempt looking and oblivious can rest assured great times are always just around the corner? It’s our youth vs. injured pride. There should be no question about which priority gets put first.

Now its only polite to offer a solution since I pointed blame. Those students and faculty that would agree with me how utterly idiotic it is to always and only point to the good and great and not the bad and ugly about college and its aftermaths need to meet together. We need to meet together and start a new counter movement in our school so that we can really strive for the best. Instead of sweeping all this under the rug and then blaming the students for ignorance and lethargy, let’s actually TRY to think innovatively for once to save this generation from being chewed up in the grist mill of a nearly bottomless recession economy.