Last week I read an interesting editorial in the Washington Post by Heather Wilson (who represented New Mexico in the U.S. House from 1997 to 2008. She is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a Rhodes Scholar), where she was bemoaning the diminishing quality of Rhodes candidates. She has been on the selection board for this prestigious scholarship for over twenty years. IN any case, the text of her editorial piece was that while the innate qualities of these candidates seem to be as high as ever, the education that they bring with themselves to these interviews seems to have let them down.
This piece is a reasoned critique of our undergraduate college system , where the ‘best and brightest’, the elite Rhodes Scholar candidates are arriving at these interviews seemingly without having had a chance to think…
An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president’s health-care bill but doesn’t really know why. A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn’t really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral. A young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year believes there are things worth dying for but doesn’t seem to have thought much about what is worth killing for. A student who wants to study comparative government doesn’t seem to know much about the important features and limitations of America’s Constitution.
Sadly enough, the fact that this is a critique is not that surprising to me. The interesting point is that in middle schools I have seen (as a student and as a teacher) various teachers bemoaning the seeming lowering of scholastic standards seen in new students. I have seen and heard similar things from high school teachers, and from college professors.
You can start to see a trend here…from the very beginning through college there is a lot of buck passing going on in the education industry. One could easily presume that this ‘dirty little secret’ has been under very little scrutiny. It is easy to see why too.
The education industry (I use this term not as some ‘snarky’ trope, but to emphasize that it should be seen as such, and held to similar standards) is actually broken up into what are seen as unrelated territories. High schools and state boards of education are not that connected to colleges and universities (at least with regard to aligning curricula and constructing and maintaining standards). Similar sorts of dis-synchrony exists at the boundaries between the various parts of the k-12 system too…
Another important point to take form this editorial is that learning how to really think, to learn to solve ‘real’ problems are some of the most important things we can pass on to the next generation…
So…how would you teach someone to think?
