However, the growth of plagiarism is not just a result of the internet, or of American students’ laziness – it also comes from students’ new perception of education. Most American students do not attend university to embrace knowledge; university is just a gateway to a successful career.
So writes Jessica Durkin in a column for Spiked. A UK citizen currently enrolled at Boston College, Durkin goes on to argue that knowledge has “intrinsic value–in broadening [students’] minds and expanding [students’] horizons,” and she insists that “society needs to promote the value of learning over a degree’s increased job potential.”
I agree with Durkin. The catch here is that we are society. We need to compose a petition, sign it, and deliver it: to ourselves. And we need to find a more rigorous and profound way to describe the intrinsic value of education. Behind the loosely inspiring talk of self-actualization must be an ethical argument that will stand scrutiny and opposition, especially when education could soon become merely a commodity.
And speaking of commodities, what of our own ideologies? What exactly is the value of learning if one believes that discourse is nothing more nor less than the circulation of power? Perhaps our students have learned from us all too well: cf. Lennard J. Davis’s article titled “The Perils of Academic Ignorance,” in Friday’s Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, I think). Davis writes:
But our attempt to balance the misleading objectivity of earlier scholarship has probably created too strong a tilt toward the purely personal. Students have become so focused on their personal likes and dislikes that they tend to discount the importance of objective reality and the wider world. We’ve put the “moi” back in memoir and taken out the “liberal” from liberal arts.
Objective reality. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen those words without scare quotes around them. Without some notion of objective reality, however, it’s difficult to see how knowledge can exist to be embraced, unless it’s the absurd (and poignant) embrace in Waiting For Godot:
ESTRAGON:
(giving up again). Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR:
(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.
ESTRAGON:
Am I?
VLADIMIR:
I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.
ESTRAGON:
Me too.
VLADIMIR:
Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.
Ah, Estragon. Ah, Vladimir. Ah, humanity! But if not now, when?
Checklists – that is what college students want. Tell me what I need to do, tell me what I need to know. Give me a list. When I’m done with your list, I’ll start working on the next one. Then I will get a job with more lists. I will live my life checking off things – passing Go and collecting my $200 over and over again.
Can you blame them? They get checklists every day. This is a world with learning standards for kindergarteners (my daughters have Virginia Standards of Learning objectives that they will be tested on when they hit the third grade). Checklists start early, and continue through their academic careers. Why? because it is easy to evaluate, at least in the sense that you can test whether or not someone knows the things on the checklist.
But can they think? That is an entirely different question that is not so easy to evaluate.
I don’t disagree that some students see college simply as a gateway to a job, or a hoop that has to be jumped through. However, I would challenge the notion that that view of college or more broadly education (as something to be gotten through, rather than enjoyed or learned from) is new or even getting worse. Not to be too much of an historian, but there’s long been a sense among students of this. [You can look at the diaries and letters of 19th century US college students to see similar sentiments, and I would guess you could find them in those of students in Europe before that.]
I also think that it’s easy to forget that there are plenty of students who genuinely want to learn (and many of them even want to learn what we’re teaching)!
I figured a historian would chime in here. 🙂 (Actually, I hoped a historian would chime in.)
I’m passingly familiar with the responses you’re talking about, and I agree that this attitude is nothing new, but I have a sense that things are indeed getting worse as the polite near-fiction of education for its own sake is abandoned even by its practitioners. I do think that college as preparation for vocation took on a new urgency in the post WWII era. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, except that “vocation” becomes more narrowly construed as “career” or “job,” and to add insult to injury, colleges and universities adopt an industrial model as they try to scale their services to meet the new demand. The assembly-line curriculum invites cynical disengagement, and we’re left with a very vicious circle. My dig at Foucault was meant to highlight the question of what ethical claims we’re prepared to make and defend as we advocate our liberal arts experience.
I’d certainly agree that an “assembly-line curriculum” does bring about the response you describe, but it’s also reasonable for students (or parents) to want to know what they’re getting for all the money they spend, and for schools to answer, “a better career”. The “liberal arts experience” is great, but education has long been seen as an investment by families in their children (or by individuals in themselves). Would it be nice if many of them wanted to learn for learning’s sake? Sure, but I can’t blame them if they (and their parents) are a little more concerned about where they’re going. Of course, part of our job as educators is to show them the genuine love we have for learning and infect them with it!