"I love learning; I hate school": An anthropology of college

388 Pages·2016·3 MB·English

by  Blum

“I L L ; I H S ”
OVE EARNING ATE CHOOL
An Anthropology of College
S D. B
USAN LUM
C U P
ORNELL NIVERSITY RESS
I L
THACA AND ONDON
For Kathi, Bobby, Linda, and Barbara
Long may we giggle play work learn worry eat rejoice together, in good health
When a teacher’s love of learning has been scorned she may find herself in
despair…. Through exploring and understanding these teachers’ despair,
along with their love of learning in teaching and its loss, we may come to see
more clearly the possibilities entailed in a larger love.
Daniel P. Liston, “Love and Despair in Teaching”
Proliferation of versions of a theory is a very usual symptom of crisis….
Scientific revolutions are … those non-cumulative developmental episodes in
which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible
new one.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
There are only two things wrong with the education system—
1. What we teach
2. How we teach it.

Roger Schank, on his website, RogerSchank.com
C
ONTENTS
Introduction
Part I. Trouble in Paradise
1. Complaints
2. The Myriad and Muddied Goals of College
Part II. Schooling and Its Oddities
3. Seeing the Air
4. Wagging the Dog
5. “What Do I Have to Do to Get an A?”
6. Campus Delights
Part III. How and Why Humans Learn
7. Beyond Cognition and Abstraction
8. Learning in the Wild, Learning in the Cage
9. Motivation Comes in at Least Two Flavors, Intrinsic and Extrinsic
10. On Happiness, Flourishing, Well-Being, and Meaning
Part IV. A Revolution in Learning
11. Both Sides Now of a Learning Revolution
Conclusion
Appendix

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
I
NTRODUCTION
What the Good Student Did Not Know
For many students the experience of schooling is easily
summed up: Nothing of real importance is a part of
classroom life, nothing is connected to anything else,
nothing is pursued to its furthest limits, nothing is ever
undertaken with investment or courage, and nothing of
lasting value is ever accomplished.
WILLIAM AYERS, On the Side of the Child
The title of this book is a quotation from an interview with a high-achieving college
student. Actually, she mentioned several times how little she liked school—how
much she hated it. In this peer interview, my undergraduate research assistant
(herself successful, enthusiastic, accepted at an Ivy League college but attending
Notre Dame because of the financial package) chimed in that she hated it too. But
then the interviewee went on to say, “I actually hate it, like, it makes me miserable
… [but] I want to be a teacher … because I feel like I can change the way school is
for people.”
People like me love both learning and school. We become professors and
teachers. And so convinced are we of our passion that it is hard to understand how
anyone wouldn’t share it—or at least it was hard for me for fifty years. I couldn’t
understand why so many students didn’t care, much less why they would hate this
system I loved so much. But I’ve learned that students have good reasons for hating
it—learned with my head and with my heart.
By the time the student actually uttered the sentence “I love learning; I hate
school,” not only was I not shocked; I was expecting it. Rarely, though, had I heard
such a clear statement of the thesis of this book. Many of our students love learning
and learn constantly and joyfully, because humans are born to learn. But the formal
schooling that has been imposed on almost all young people until well into
adulthood—now, that is a much tougher fit. Because people are adaptable, most can
be shaped to endure, and some even end up, like the one quoted here, at first-rate
universities. But that doesn’t mean this is the way things should be.
“I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College tells the story of how
I, a professor with twenty-five years of university teaching, an anthropologist
studying this subject, a mother of two young adults, and a lifelong lover of
schooling, lost faith in school but gained faith in my fellow humans.
Like many other college professors, I constantly asked myself and colleagues,
“Why don’t they care!?” But after a while I took the question as not just rhetorical
but as a genuine one. This book is my answer.
Why Don’t College Students Care about Learning?
Until I was fifty, I’d spent almost all my life living in, for, and through school.
“Going to school” had been my primary activity, every day, for half a century. From
nursery school through my Ph.D. and then as a professor at five universities, with
side stints in Elderhostels, preschools, and everything in between, public, private,
religious, I loved school. I was good at it, and it was good to me. I was a true
believer.
I will tell you about critics’ complaints such as that students “don’t care” or don’t
learn, even at our best universities; I’ll show why it is inevitable that schooling as we
know it prevents learning. I see this as a crisis preceding a radical transformation. I
end with suggestions about eliminating the automatic assumption that every young
adult should go to college, and I discuss some of the good ideas floating around that
can improve learning.
The bottom line is this: the more learning in school resembles the successful
learning that is so abundant outside school, the greater the chance that some
learning will take place. Learning occurs everywhere, all around us, often
extremely effective and welcome. It can be observed in Bible study, book clubs, film
groups, computer applications; in sewing, gardening, cooking; in dancing, playing
sports, fixing cars, building things—in short most of what we do in most of our life.
The basic idea is that humans are born to learn, but not only cognitively. We are
social, embodied, and emotional animals, with the capacity for learning any version
of human culture. The more we take “learning” out of context and put it, cleanly
and abstractly, into an institutional framework and ask students to perform in
isolation, the less possible it is to learn. This now universal system of
institutionalized schooling not only destroys joy and curiosity, and creates dropouts
and failures, winners and losers. It also often fails to achieve even the goals we set,
however assessed and however defined. This system that reduces humans to
“thinkers” has existed for perhaps three centuries but has been widespread for only
about a hundred years. Though people like me can operate at that abstract,
cognitive, theoretical level, most people are doomed to fail if asked to work this
way. As a result, we find cheating, alienation, resistance, corner-cutting, fixation on
credentials. To combat all this, faculty and administrators increasingly focus on
managerial approaches. Students learn plenty; they just don’t learn the stuff
presented by teachers in classrooms. Most classroom material is forgotten
immediately; students even boast about it. This seems criminally wasteful.
I used to be frustrated by my students as individuals. I blamed them for their lack
of devotion to the scholarly cause. Like other faculty, I grumbled and complained
and, I’m sorry to say, disdained. And then I studied this problem anthropologically,
but also as a human being. In the end, I discovered compassion for students
struggling within a system they did not devise and that cannot possibly suit their
human needs. And I changed my own heart, mind, and behavior as a result. I love
the students; I deplore the system.
The factors influencing my reconsideration are both personal and professional,
emotional and intellectual, accidental and deliberate. I spend most of this book
describing the pieces that led to this turnaround which took me so much by
surprise. My goal is to use one person’s trajectory to provoke a larger rumination
about these matters. By bringing to bear the wisdom of anthropology—the study of
humankind—I suggest we establish radically alternative ways of raising our young.
Youth need to learn; workers need to know things; citizens need to be informed.
But the system of schooling that keeps people virtual incompetents into their
twenties, always trying to please teachers in order to be evaluated by uniform
standards, stuffing unwanted information and skills into their distracted brains,
delaying responsibility and promising an always deferred payoff—this familiar
system of schooling is recent and peculiar. An anthropological look at learning
reveals many of the flaws of this industrial educational model, which resembles the
model of industrial agriculture similarly under reconsideration. (I explore the
parallels in greater depth in the appendix.) And like the food system, education is
ripe for a major overhaul, a revolution.
Dreams of a New Paradigm
I believe that before too long there will be widespread recognition of the
ineffectiveness and inhumanity of universal compulsory schooling guided by an
industrial model of predetermined, teacher-centered curriculum, measured by
time-in-seat and assessed by high-stakes testing, with sorting (evident in grades and
scores) as the principal goal. This dominant educational paradigm replicates race
and class inequalities and distorts the natural human need to move around and
have varied experiences. A new paradigm must come; the current one clearly works
only for a few.
This dream of a new model has many facets. In such a vision, our young would
be learning life skills and academic (cognitive) skills as motivated by need and
desire, building on humans’ natural—and I mean this in a truly evolutionary sense
—curiosity and ability to discover patterns. This would happen through some
formal, structured ways of learning but also through learning by observation,
learning by doing, learning by apprenticeship in both the loose and the strict
meanings. There would be many who find opportunities to earn a living by the
time they are in their middle to late teens; we would accept the immense capacity of
people at all ages. In fact, age would no longer be the defining category of
personhood, the straitjacket that it has been across a century of industrial schooling.
By the time people reach late adolescence, many would find not just jobs but