Students Prefer Old-Fashioned Lectures to Cutting-Edge Techno Wizzardry

The National Post has a report on a new study that shows that Canadian university students say that they learn more in traditional lecture courses than they do in courses with on-line components. (Thanks to Scott Masson for pointing out this article.)

They’re addicted to Facebook and slaves to their smartphones — “digital natives” trying to navigate the post-secondary world. But as universities spend millions on e-learning tools to help cater to this tech-savvy generation, current students say they’re learning more in classes that don’t have all the technological bells and whistles.

In fact, the first Canadian study of its kind has discovered that students prefer — and learn more — when a live lecturer stands at an unadorned podium. The finding surprised even the study’s authors.

“We were expecting to see evidence of what’s known as the ‘digital native’ era and we just didn’t see that,” said Joseph Berger, director of business development and communications at Higher Education Strategy Associates, the Canadian education consultancy that published the study Thursday.

“It’s not the portrait we expected whereby students would embrace anything that happens on a more highly technological level. It’s to the contrary — they really seem to like access to human interaction, a smart person at the front of the classroom.”

Well, of course. We professors already knew that and didn't need a "study" to tell us. But maybe the "study" will impress the administrators. Those of us who teach, especially in the humanities, know that reading, listening to lectures and face to face questions and answers are the essence of a liberal arts education. Students benefit from having a real, live professor who has studies the subject all his or her life right there in front of them so that actual, face-t0-face communication is possible.

This does not mean that there is no place for electronic learning resources any more than it means that if you have lectures you don't need books and libraries. Any student theoretically can get an education just by going to the library and reading long enough and diligently enough. But few will do so and it is an inefficient method even for those who do have the self-motivation to pursue it.

The essence of a university course is having a teacher who knows you, your background and who is going to respond to your questions and help you learn. Lectures, tutorials, seminars, question and answer sessions, review sessions, outlines, assigned readings and Socratic questioning are all part of a good university course. Learning is the point; conveying information (which is what the internet is good for) is just part of the process.

As universities become larger and classes become larger the illusion that technology can make up for a lack of a good student-professor ratio is a bureaucrat's dream and a student's nightmare.

Heh, heh, ho, ho: Western Civ Has Got to Go!

Mona Charon at The National Review is happy that her son, who goes off to college this Fall, is going to study Music. Why? Because it is one of the disciplines least affected by grade inflation, political correctness and the obsession with sex that characterizes most of Western higher education today.

A recent report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education counts David’s college as among the seven best for free speech in the nation. That such a list is required speaks volumes. The seven are Arizona State, Dartmouth, William and Mary, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and the University of Virginia. Not that these seven are moderate in their political or social views. Don’t make me laugh. Not that they have more than one or two Republicans on the whole humanities faculty. Ha! No, these schools excel simply because they don’t exert the kind of totalitarian thought and speech control so commonplace on American campuses.

Colleges are actually ranked on being "best for free speech"? In America? Who knew? Higher education is sinking lower and lower.

We scrape together our hard-earned income (lots of it) to deposit our cherished offspring at schools that are determined to teach them to despise everything we revere — even learning.

Three decades ago, at Stanford University, Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” If you were in any doubt, the National Association of Scholars reports that the mob was wildly successful. The institutions that are (or were) one of the glories of Western civilization — universities — now no longer see the worth of teaching the history of the West. In The Vanishing West, the NAS examined the curricula at 50 leading colleges over time. In 1964, all of them required some sort of Western civilization survey course or interdisciplinary course treating the same themes. They began with Greek civilization and encompassed Rome, the rise of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, literature, art, music, the history of science, political philosophy, the modern era, and so forth. By 2010, none of the 50 colleges required any course in Western Civ. Even for history majors, survey courses on Western civilization are rarely required. The same is true for American history.

Students can still find courses on these subjects, but only as choices in a vast cafeteria of offerings that also includes courses like “Lesbian Queer Media Cultures” (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), “The Living and the Undead: An Inquiry Into Zombies in Cinema and Literature” (University of Mississippi), “The Militarization of American Daily Life” (Oberlin), and “The American Sexual Past” (Temple University). The term “higher education” is fast becoming a misnomer. American students are graduating with scads of courses on zombies and queer theory — which is why we’re importing an ever-larger number of our Ph.D.s.

What is wrong with colleges and universities today? They are occupied territory, having been conquered and occupied by the Generation of 68 with its anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-intellectual left-wing superstitions.

A liberal parent may glow with excitement and pride at the prospect of his child attending college. Isn’t that why she got straight A’s, crammed for the SATs, played travel soccer, and dug wells in Guatemala during summer breaks? But no conservative can be entirely cheerful at the prospect of an impressionable youth being bundled off to a university in the United States. Academia is a conquered land — the playground of the ultra left.

The fusion of Greek philosophy and science with Biblical revelation sparked the creation of the greatest civilization in the history of the world. Political liberalism, democracy, the separation of church and state, individual liberty, capitalism, science, Gothic cathedrals and classical music are just some of its accomplishments.

To think all this is evil, depraved and unworthy of study is to reject one's own tradition and one's own identity in favor of a revolutionary, Utopian, Gnostic dream of human perfectibility and economic equality.

Jesse Jackson can rest easy: Western civilization is sinking beneath the waves. I hope he is proud that the only civilization in the history of the world to abolish slavery so far is going down. I hope he is glad that universities are the least free, the most mediocre and the lowest quality they have ever been. After all, that is what passes for progress for Progressives.

University Education Under Fascism

In the Corporatist State of Sinclair Lewis's depiction of fascist America in It Can't Happen Here, it is interesting to see his take on what university education would look like under Fascism. All American universities are closed and entirely new Corporatist ones are created:

"Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the new Corpo state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs in recivilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called 'intellectual' teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of 'intellectualism.'

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.

Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archeology, philolophy; all history before 1500 - except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarianians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained,but, to avoid the superstitious errors inordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin.

Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to wast time on the so-called 'literature'; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief choruses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned except Shakespeare and Milton.

In the realm of so-called 'pure science,' it was realized that only too much and too confusing research had already been done, but no pre-Corpo university had ever shown such a wealth of courses in mining engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern foremanship and production methods, exhibition gymnastics, the higher accountancy, therapeutics of athlete's foot, canning and fruit dehydration, kindergarten training, organization of chess, checkers, and bridge tournaments, cultivation of will power, band music for mass meetings, schnauzer-breeding, stainless-steel formulae, cement-road construction, and all other useful subjects for the formation of he new-world mind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary department of scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestly taught, and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests in infantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operations of tanks, armored cars, and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits, thought students were urged not to elect sports for more than one third of their credits.

What really showed the difference from old-foggy inefficiency was that with the educational speed-up of the Corpo universities, any bright lad could graduate in two years." (pp. 207-8)

I'm afraid to comment on this vision very extensively; suffice it to say that I fight a mild, incremental and respectable version of it every day.

Benedict XVI , the Pathologies of Faith and Reason and Christian Liberal Arts Education

Samuel Gregg is an intelligent and articulate interpreter of Catholic theology, especially moral theology and economics. He has a very good article entitled "Benedict XVI: In No One's Shadow" in the American Spectator.

He discusses Benedict's reform of the banalities of the post-Vatican II liturgy and the fast-improving relations with the Eastern Orthodox Churches before turning to Benedict's analysis of what is wrong with the Western world. He articulates concisely and precisely some ideas I have clumsily tried to express about Benedict's importance as a prophet to late modernity. He writes:

"But above all, Benedict has -- from his pontificate's very beginning -- gone to the heart of the rot within the West, a disease which may be described as pathologies of faith and reason.

In this regard, Benedict's famous 2006 Regensburg address may go down as one of the 21st century's most important speeches, comparable to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard Address in terms of its accuracy in identifying some of the West's inner demons.

Most people think about the Regensburg lecture in terms of some Muslims' reaction to Benedict's citation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor. That, however, is to miss Regensburg's essence. It was really about the West.

Christianity, Benedict argued at Regensburg, integrated Biblical faith, Greek philosophy, and Roman law, thereby creating the "foundation of what can rightly be called Europe." This suggests that any weakening of this integration of faith and reason would mean the West would start losing its distinctive identity. In short, a West without a Christianity that integrates faith and reason is no longer the West.

Today, Benedict added, we see what happens when faith and reason are torn asunder. Reason is reduced to scientism and ideologies of progress, thereby rending reasoned discussion of anything beyond the empirical impossible. Faith dissolves into sentimental humanitarianism, an equally inadequate basis for rational reflection. Neither of these emaciated facsimiles of their originals can provide any coherent response to the great questions pondered by every human being: "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?" "Where am I going?"

So what's the way back? To Benedict's mind, it involves affirming that what he recently called creative reason lies at the origin of everything.

As Benedict explained one week before he beatified his predecessor: "We are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are irrationality, lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of everything, or are reason, freedom and love at the origin of being? Does the primacy belong to unreason or to reason? This is what everything hinges upon in the final analysis."

Read it all here. I totally agree with Gregg's analysis of the Regensburg Address and I have made the exact same argument about it in a recently published chapter in a book.

I especially like his use of the phrase "integration of faith and reason" to describe the cultural origins of Europe in Greek philosophy, Biblical faith and Roman law. This phrase "the integration of faith and reason" is often used in a banal and empty manner in Christian liberal arts colleges. One can never be quite sure what is meant by it and it can easily degenerate into little more than a marketing slogan. But Benedict gives it some specific form and content.

What if this definition of integrating faith and reason were to be taken seriously in Christian liberal arts education? What if the liberal arts curriculum were to be organized around this motif as the center? What if the goal of a liberal arts curriculum were to become conversant with Greek philosophy, Biblical faith and Roman law and how they shaped Christendom and then how modernity has declined and both philosophy and law decayed because of modernity's rejection of the Biblical basis of the Christian West?

This would make Christian university education decisively different from the secular version on offer in the decadent, late modern universities. It would revolutionize the teaching of literature, the natural sciences, the social sciences and history, as well as philosophy and theology. It would produce citizens of a Christian culture who were equipped to see through the modern pathologies of faith and reason and ready to be real salt and light in a dying culture. Could Evangelicals liberal arts colleges, with an assist from this scholar-pope, dream of being that radical and that counter-cultural? Do we have the faith to follow Christ when all around us God is being dismissed as out-dated and unnecessary? Can we as faculty and our students make a reasoned and articulate case for creative reason (the Logos of John 1) as the origin and meaning of everything?

Well, why not?

In Defense of the Liberal Arts

At National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson speaks out in defense of the liberal arts against both the therapeutic Left and the utilitarian Right.

The liberal arts face a perfect storm. The economy is struggling with obscenely high unemployment and is mired in massive federal and state deficits. Budget cutting won’t spare education.

The public is already angry over fraud, waste, and incompetence in our schools and universities. And in these tough times, taxpayers rightly question everything about traditional education — from teachers’ unions and faculty tenure to the secrecy of university admissions policies to which courses really need to be taught.

Opportunistic private trade schools have sprouted in every community, offering online certification in practical skills without the frills and costs of so-called liberal-arts “electives.”

In response to these challenges, the therapeutic academic Left proved incapable of defending the traditional liberal arts. With three decades of defining the study of literature and history as a melodrama of race, class, and gender oppression, it managed to turn off college students and the general reading public. And, cheek by jowl, the utilitarian Right succeeded in reclassifying business and finance not just as undergraduate majors, but also as core elements in general-education requirements.

In such a climate, it is unsurprising that once again we hear talk of cutting the “non-essentials” in our colleges, such as Latin, Renaissance history, Shakespeare, Plato, Rembrandt, and Chopin.

This is a strange alliance of Left and Right against the conservative impulse to remember the past, meditate on transcendent things and refuse to embrace the cult of novelty. Hanson writes:

But the liberal arts train students to write, think, and argue inductively, while drawing upon evidence from a shared body of knowledge. Without that foundation, it is harder to make — or demand from others — logical, informed decisions about managing our supercharged society as it speeds on by.

Citizens — shocked and awed by technological change — become overwhelmed by the Internet chatter, cable news, talk radio, video games, and popular culture of the moment. Without links to our heritage, we in ignorance begin to think that our own modern challenges — the war in Afghanistan, gay marriage, cloning, or massive deficits — are unique and not comparable to those solved in the past.

And without citizens broadly informed by the humanities, we descend into a pyramidal society. A tiny technocratic elite on top crafts everything from cell phones and search engines to foreign policy and economic strategy. A growing mass below has neither understanding of the present complexity nor the basic skills to question what they are told.

The liberal arts are the "liberating arts;" they are the studies undertaken by the free man who wishes to remain free and make the best use of that freedom. The liberal arts explore what makes humans different from high-tech beasts. The liberal arts connect us to our tradition, our past, our heritage and the things that transcend time: beauty, goodness and truth.

A collectivist society ruled by the Conditioners has no need of the liberal arts. In fact, the liberal arts are a threat to the rulers and conditioners. In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond, the Controller for Europe, keeps the Bible and Shakespeare locked up in a safe. Such works are dangerous to tyrants and social engineers because they convey a view of man as possessing free will, a conscience and a capacity to know God. All this breeds people who are hard to control and manipulate, who question authority and who cannot easily be kept in their place.

The liberal arts will be needed as long as people are free and when the darkness of totalitarianism falls they will fade away.