“Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”
The quotation, which comes from Bob Herbert’s column (http://www.nytimes.com/), would make one suspect that those who fit this description either have great difficulty getting a degree or graduate with very low grade point averages. However, his column reveals a different trend: students who are ill prepared and poorly motivated, and who advance little or not at all in the critical skills their education is meant to impart, not only get their degrees, but also leave college with averages between B and B-plus.
That many colleges make it easy for many sub-par students to attend their schools and complete a degree is quite well known these days. That they set absurdly low standards, and offer vapid courses within intellectually vacant degree programs so students can navigate four years of learning without learning anything might make some parents upset. Yet, if colleges were to uphold standards or impose rigor, they would be forced to turn away or flunk out too many students necessary to their revenue and existence.
The “attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors…at odds with academic commitment” that define college students have been planted and cultivated by the American public school system. By the time kids reach college, this system has fully conditioned them to value leisure, fun, games, and just about anything else other than academic work.
When kids begin school as elementary students, they enter a system that pressures them with excessive homework and yearly tests. Piling homework on elementary kids predates the Bush era’s “No Child Left Behind” policy, which has driven the testing mania for the past decade. Although “No Child Left Behind” was badly conceived and implemented, its goal of challenging students by testing what they had specifically learned in each subject in the elementary grades was laudable. Unfortunately, too many states hastily developed exams and reduced too many classroom lessons to mind numbing drill work that ended up replacing intelligent educational practices.
After the stress of elementary grade testing, students reach middle school, and are prepared to face more academic rigor. Ironically, it is at this point that school begins its slide toward academic and intellectual anemia. In middle schools, the philosophy, and thus primary objective, is to nurture the emotional growth of kids rather than propel their intellectual progress. In line with this approach is a policy of social promotion. Students quickly discover that they can never study, fail five or more subjects and still proceed to the next grade. By the end of two years, the middle school experience has eroded the academic commitment and work ethic initiated in the earlier grades and necessary to foster further academic and intellectual growth.
In high school academic discipline loses even more ground. Students enter an environment that is obsessed with sports, clubs, bake sales; they are forced to attend assemblies, countless meetings with guidance counselors, appointments with social workers or and psychologists. These, and endless other distractions, dominate a school’s tone and reduce class work, homework and studying to secondary importance.
Herbert’s thesis that colleges permit (maybe even encourage, I would think) students to skate through fours years of school without exerting themselves, and then reward them with respectable B-plus or B GPA’s only exposes the tip of the problem. For six years prior, schools provide a smooth and easy way to flow toward college with little effort or concern. To expect colleges to buck this momentum of academic sloth and negligence, especially at great financial cost to themselves, is wildly naive. So, things will remain as they are, as the few who labor and learn continue to leave behind those too foolish and indolent to know what they will have lost.
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