Edumacation Deflation

As the late bluesman Dr. John once so eloquently put it, “Your edumucation ain’t no better than what you understand.” Unfortunately, despite a great deal of 'edumucating', it is highly debatable whether or not our colleges are producing much understanding. By this, I do not mean to make the sort of critique that a salty blue-collar laborer might make about the new college boy who has just come onto the job, someone who might be full of head learning but lacking in the practical experiences of life. This old animosity is just the natural tension between youth and experience, between knowledge and wisdom. A great education is like the wineskin that Jesus talked about—young, fresh, and new. But it will age. And the age will improve it.

This old animosity is just the natural tension between youth and experience, between knowledge and wisdom. A great education is like the wineskin that Jesus talked about—young, fresh, and new. But it will age. And the age will improve it.

         I am pointing at something different that has been occurring on our college campuses for decades. It is not that our college courses are too theoretical and not practical. It is that our college courses have increasingly turned soft. They have ceased to demand serious intellectual effort and have instead made education into a toxic concoction of vacuous box-ticking exercises mixed with a demand for ideological conformity. There is a kind of education that scratches at the surface of the mind. It focuses on processes and facts to be memorized (and then probably swiftly forgotten). But it fails to cut deeper into the mind and address one’s actual understanding. The actual process of learning to think—to think critically, to think clearly—is a far more difficult and painful process than most students are prepared for. And it is a process increasingly absent from America’s classrooms.

         In their 2011 book entitled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa give a fairly grim survey of the present state of American colleges and universities. One of their most striking observations is that 45% of college students see no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over the course of their freshman and sophomore years.\[1] I would argue that this is largely because the first two years of college are essentially remedial, teaching students what they should have learned in their high schools. Only 38% of 2018 ACT test takers scored high enough to be considered prepared for college-level coursework,\[2] while 69.1% of them still went on to college.\[3] So those first two years necessarily must be significantly dumbed down while half the class either catches up or drops out.

One of their most striking observations is that 45% of college students see no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over the course of their freshman and sophomore years.

This, however, is more of an indictment of our K-12 schools than it is a critique of our colleges. Colleges do have to play the hand that they are dealt. If half of their incoming freshmen are insufficiently prepared, then some amount of remedial work must be done in those first two years. This is all the more reason to invest in our K-12 schools.\[4] Nevertheless, our colleges have unfortunately adjusted to accommodate our nation’s lower and lower expectations for education. Arum and Roksa describe what a current college student in America can hope for— “They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master. These findings are sobering and should be a cause for concern.”\[5]

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[1] Academically Adrift pg 36

[2] https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/cccr2018/National-CCCR-2018.pdf

[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm

[4] It is worth pointing out here the explosion of classical, Christian education over the past forty years in America. The movement, launched by Douglas Wilson’s 1990 Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, is the one great success story in the evangelical church’s fight to advance a distinctively Christian culture. The Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), which is the premier catalyst for this movement, currently educates over 100,000 students across America.

[5] Academically Adrift pg 121