Not-Knowing

J. Peder Zane thoughtfully considers the "knowledge deficit" among today's college students. Citing a dinner conversation with some University of North Carolina professors, Zane observes:

All of them have noted that such ignorance isn't new -- students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, "It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."

I think Trachtenberg is right, but Zane himself is only partially correct in his own explanation of this state of affairs:

In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to master any particular discipline -- e.g. computers, life insurance, medicine -- has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become specialists, people who know more and more about less and less.

Add to this two other factors: the mind-set that puts work at the center of American life and the deep fear spawned by the rise of globalization and other free market approaches that have turned job security into an anachronism. In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training. In the parlance of journalism, they want news they can use.

It is indeed "vocational training" that most students expect from college, but it is not "knowledge" they seek in pursuing such training. They want to be given skills, practical advice about how to accomplish specific career-related tasks, not knowledge per se. This wouldn't be so problematic if it weren't likely most people will change careers or find themselves in situations where their lack of real knowledge will only make them seem. . .well, ignorant.

Thus in the creative writing class Zane describes, in which the students reveal they neither know nor care about Jack Kerouac, these students "aspire" only to be told what they need to do to become best-selling novelists (to the extent they aren't there just "to get a requirement out of the way"). This mindset perhaps also explains William Gass's frustration in teaching creative writing even to graduate M.F.A. students in a distinguished university. Where fiction is concerned, they want to know how to do it, not what distinguishes it as literary art in the work of great writers, past or present.

The teaching of literature more generally has mostly succumbed to the demand for "skills" as well. Literary study is now not a matter of familiarizing oneself with literary history or learning how best to engage with "literature itself." Students are provided with the critical thinking skills that can be acquired through reading literature closely, skills that presumably can be transferred to other contexts where "thinking" is required (in today's academy, especially contexts in which we are encourged to think about social codes and political oppression). I believe that studying literature can indeed help develop critical thinking skills, but this secondary benefit has now become the entire raison d'etre of literary study.

Zane is correct to conclude that "In the here and now, get-the-job-done environment of modern America, the knowledge for knowledge's sake ethos that is the foundation of a liberal arts education -- and of a rich and satisfying life -- has been shoved to the margins. Curiously, in a world where everything is worth knowing, nothing is." But we're not likely to recover the circumstances which made the "knowledge for knowledge's sake ethos" seem desirable in the first place. Too many working- and middle-class families now see "college" as the corridor through which students must briefly travel on their way to well-paying, respectable jobs in the office building on the other side. And since one can't blame these families for adopting such an attiitude--we're a culture that esteems acquiring an "occupation," not an education in itself--it's hard to see how the predicament Zane describes won't become only more pronounced.

Comments

[susan]

As an older student I have indeed noticed the "what do I need to know this for?" and in fact, sympathized as I wound my way through four semesters of algebra that I knew I hadn't needed to know in 35 years, nor probably would in those remaining. This may be a simplistic minor reason in addition to the career and specialization goals which I agree are perhaps the main cause, but I also feel that part of the problem is due to one of the best learning tools available in this era. Yep, the internet. No one really needs to know or remember what is so readily at our fingertips and keyboard. "Look it up" has been replaced by "Google it."

[Kim]

As a high school English teacher, I face this problem everyday. Not only do students want to know what financial benefit they will get from learning whatever I'm teaching, but administrators and legislators do also. The whole accountability and NCLB situation is all part of turning schools into businesses. Businesses don't care about knowledge for knowledge sake--it's all about profits. Sad but true. I agree with you that this situation isn't going to improve.

[Nathan]

Addressing Susan's comment about Googling it, what's astounded me among many of my students is the assumption that the Internet contains the whole available knowledge of the world, and not simply the knowledge/information that enters its frame. Simply put, Google only has access to information that's linkable, and this excludes a whole host of other research media -- print journals, books, microfiche (remember microfiche!), audio & video archives, etc. & etc.

Another danger, coupled with this first one, is that the rise of computer literacy has not also created a rise of critical judgement about what one may find on the Internet. I once had a University student (a freshman) who gave me a research paper where one of the sources was a webpage created by a fourth-grade class in Ohio, as part of their "Fun with Computers!" project (or something like that). This student never bothered to check whether the text he was quoting was from a legitimate source. He simply Googled it, cut, pasted, and slapped the URL into the Works Cited page.

[Cameron]

I think the "knowledge crisis" here isn't unique to university environments. Here, in Colorado, the implication that the only use knowledge has is towards practical skill-sets is brought up as early as elementary school. The local standardized test, the CSAP, is the basis for school funding and subsequently teacher salaries. If a teacher's class improves on the CSAP year-to-year, the teacher gets a pay raise.

Of course, this leads to teachers teaching solely to concepts present on the test. This practice can take up months at a time during the school year and continues into secondary education. Other, "superfluous" knowledge is relegated to very few hours a day, mostly in the form of student electives in high school.

It's no wonder knowledge isn't being prized for its own sake, when the system is concerned more about lateral transition through the educational system into the working world. Nathan's point about the university system epitomizes the current apathy of the university student. We don't particularly care if something's done well, as long as it's done. It's just another step towards getting our degree. And due to pressures of grade inflation, professors--particularly in fresh/soph intro classes--grade on completion, rather than content.

The fact that people are eschewing Kerouac is just a symptom of the a much greater academic and intellectual enrichment poverty which is taking place among my peers.

[genevieve]

Maybe this means that the downsizing achieved under globalisation has pinched people's minds and hearts as well as their wallets. But these things can turn around - I think these young 'uns will change their minds about knowledge when they are older and less 'wise' than they want to be, in much the same way that their boomer parents have become somewhat reactionary.