Time for Teaching

Time. Of course it's on my mind because this is final exam week, a week when "time" is a precious and hard-to-find commodity. Time is also on my mind because an email from a Modern Sophist follower finally reminded me that it has been more than four months (!) since my last post. That's an eternity in cyber-time.

Time has become an issue in the university right now as the governor of Indiana presses colleges and universities to consider offering three-year bachelor's degrees. The benefits, of course, are (a) less student loan debt (fewer years of tuition to pay) and (b) faster entry into the workforce (thus increasing how much money you can earn before retirement). But already the familiar refrain of negativity has begun: How can we provide quality education with less quantity? Where do we slash the core curriculum; how much general education do students need? Does reducing the time it takes to complete an undergraduate degree necessarily mean lowering our standards?

In Time for Life, John Robinson and Geofrey Godbey tell us that we need "time-savoring skills": "To be happier and wiser, it is easier to increase appreciation levels more than efficiency levels. Only by appreciating more can we hope to have a sustainable society" (316). If we apply this to the teaching that takes place in the university, the prospect of a three-year bachelor's degree becomes less scary - but also revolutionary. What if we stepped back as a society and reevaluated what college really needs to teach people? More and more I'm convinced that bachelor's degrees are not vocational training; whatever degree you leave college with, you will learn your profession in OJT (on the job training). Every employer out there knows this: No college grad is ready to hit the ground running; college and career are separate entities.

Here is a synopsis of the current approach to undergraduate education in the U.S.: We shuttle college students into "majors" that help them specialize in preparation for a career, and then we pack their schedules with "gen eds" that supposedly give them a well-rounded education. The "core curriculum," as those general education classes are often known, is intended to provide an interdisciplinary education, and the intention here is commendable. But in practice, students spend two years (at my institution, the core curriculum is almost half the required number of credit hours for a bachelor's degree) taking classes which they perceive as having little relevance to their career goals as well as having little connection to one another; the effect is frustrated and fragmented educational experience, wherein students may enjoy individual classes but still seem to feel, on the whole, that the university is quite literally wasting their time.

I propose a different method for improving the time students spend in college. In our information-saturated, technology-wired, global-spanning society, what people really need to learn in college is how to learn. Most adults will change their careers - not just jobs, but actual careers - at least once in their lives; I can't tell you how many English majors I've met who are now in business, medicine, or the law, though they started out thinking they wanted to be teachers. (In fact, I'm married to one!) The great benefit of a major like the English major is the flexible, analytical thinking it teaches students. English majors are a versatile bunch because they know how to reflect, how to read closely, how to write well, how to communicate effectively, how to analyze. Other majors teach this, too, but the point is, shouldn't that be the point of a college education - to learn how to learn for the rest of your life, rather than trying to prepare, outside of the workplace, for a career?

What if we took the time students spend in college and made it less about teaching - the curriculum, the standards, the outcomes - and more abut learning? What if we offered two degrees: a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science? What if students didn't declare "majors" and "minors" but decided on one of these two degrees and then spent three years immersed in classes that taught them how to read, write, research, theorize, explore, question, communicate? I'm not advocating doing away with Biology or Chemistry or Political Science or Literature. I'm simply suggesting that, as highly educated individuals, university professors could put our heads together and come up with a dynamic, truly interdisciplinary, highly individualized program of study for students that would prepare them for the complex, ever-evolving work of our global economy - and for being responsible citizens in a globalized world.

Robinson and Godfrey tell us that Americans tend to interpret efficiency as "always...wanting more," yet "appreciating may start both with valuing more about what is already here and with wanting less" (316). I posit that we should value what we already have in the American university system - faculty in many different specialty areas who are poised to provide a rich educational experience to some of the most highly literate and well-educated young people to ever step onto college campuses - but want less: less specialization amongst students (who don't really know what they want to do with their careers at 18), less focus on what comes after college (let the workforce prepare its own, as they already do), less insistence on compartmentalizing knowledge within academic departments (even as we preach interdisciplinary learning). If we take time for teaching what really matters, we can make the most of the time we do have with students - even if that time is three years instead of four.