In Defense of Lectures

An article by Daniel de Vise on the Washington Post website today explains that colleges are widely questioning the value of lectures and are exploring alternate ways of structuring their classes. The exposition of the topic strikes me as a strange mixture of common sense and misplaced priorities. But then that probably describes the confused perspectives that researchers and policymakers have on various areas of education.

The anti-lecture movement is based on the belief that conducting classes according to that model drives many students away from courses in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and fails to promote active engagement with the material. I’m inclined to counter, however, with the assertion that nothing can drive a truly committed student away, and that it’s natural that lectures don’t determine how students respond to the material, because that’s not the class’s role. The purpose of the class is just to teach that material.

Part of the objection presented by de Vise, though, actually specifically regards lectures as the most effective way of teaching. It seems to me that that’s a decidedly positive trait, but educational leaders evidently see it as partial grounds for rebelling against the existing models. Granted, efficiency is not tantamount to effectiveness, but when the system is actually designed not only to teach well, but to teach large groups of people, efficiency is one aspect of overall effectiveness.

The problem that’s presented here seemingly not that so much that lectures are not a good way of conveying information, but rather that they’re not a good way of stimulating interest. Again, it is my earnest belief that at the college level it shouldn’t be up to the teacher or the class structure to do this. When I was a teenager, it was always my assumption that the students who went on to college did so because they believed in the importance of what they were studying and were genuinely interested in it.

A love of learning and an active work ethic may be things that need to be instilled in children at the primary and secondary levels of education, but that’s why elementary and high school classes don’t take the form of lectures. By the time you’re a college student, you should be able to sit back and listen to a lecture and then have the motivation to speak to your professor directly if you’re having trouble with a concept or calculation.

De Vise quotes Diane Bunce, a chemistry professor at Catholic University as saying, “Learning doesn’t happen in the physical space between the instructor and the student. Learning happens in the student’s mind.”

That’s right, it does. I don’t see how this makes the case that changing from lecturing to some other classroom model will improve educational outcomes. Learning doesn’t happen in the physical space between people no matter what methodology fills that space. If learning happens in the student’s mind, it is entirely up to the student to take ownership of that learning. It is up to the teacher to teach. He may do so effectively or ineffectively, but that’s a function of his merit and ambition, not of institutional policy.

De Vise goes on to explain that the anxiety over driving away students from STEM majors is based on the fact that only about half of the students who start college pursuing such a discipline actually complete their degree. “There are myriad reasons for the mass exodus,” he says. “The material is demanding. Math-science professors tend to be tough graders.”

The challenge of the material and the presence of objectively right and wrong answers aren’t going to change with classroom methodologies. It takes personal fortitude for a student to excel in a subject area that does not come easily to him, and that is not something that can be given to him by artificial means.

What I believe strongly but many educators seemingly find unconscionable is that some degree of attrition is actually a good thing. I didn’t even study a science discipline at university, but I still found myself constantly surrounded by disinterested and low-aptitude students. My education was rather effective on account of the strengths of my instructors, whether in lecture halls or seminars, but I can’t help but wonder how much better it would have been for all if a lesser caliber of student hadn’t frequently dragged down the tone of the class.

In high school as in college, I find that the majority impulse seems to be to manufacture an illusion of equal achievement, and that lowers the standard of education for all but the few students at the bottom who in all likelihood just aren’t interested in applying themselves to their learning. This impulse is more defensible at the secondary level, when part of the role of education is still to convince young and malleable minds of the value of education. But if you haven’t learned that lesson adequately by the time you’ve enrolled in college, you may not belong there. If there are students for whom lectures aren’t working, that classroom structure should push them towards one of two responses: either they work harder on their own time to keep up, or they drop out of their discipline or their school.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If a class has a particularly high level of student attrition, the instructor is probably doing something wrong. Perhaps his lectures are confusing, or his demeanor is overly aggressive, or he is never personally available to his students. But what’s of issue here is that it seems pretty unlikely to me that such problems can be solved just by changing the accepted model of classroom instruction. Students aren’t generally retained or lost according to the whether a class is a lecture, a seminar, or something else entirely. What matters most is the quality of the teaching.

In fact, alternate methods can create new problems just as well as it can solve old ones. De Vise’s article describes some of the classes that have already moved away from lecture-based instruction in STEM courses, and to differing extents these involve students working together to discuss material or solve problems. This isn’t going to work for everybody any more than lectures have. What happens when an exceptional student is paired with a terrible one? Isn’t it just possible that some students focus better when asked to pay attention and take notes than they do when they’re made to work in groups? Surely, some students perform better when they listen attentively to a lecture and then take that as a starting point for personal engagement with their course of study outside of class.

But to explain the social transformation that is governing this shift, de Vise says, “Gone are the days when the professor could recite a textbook in class. The watchword of today is ‘active learning.’”

The watchword of the day? Shouldn’t that have been the watchword of always? If a professor is reciting a textbook in class, he’s certainly not encouraging active learning, but it’s worth keeping in mind that encouragement is absolutely the most that the professor can provide in that domain. It would be preferable if he taught more actively, but as Professor Bunce said above, learning happens in the student’s mind. Active learning can be applied to coursework for any discipline, no matter what the professor’s methodology or talent. The effectiveness of that active learning will frequently be affected by how good an instructor one’s professor is, but there’s no catchall methodological shift that will make a student’s commitment a foregone conclusion. Student and teacher really do need to meet each other half way with active learning and active teaching.

De Vise later quotes Harvard physicist Eric Mazur to reiterate the pejorative notion of what lecturing is: “You have a professor reading a book to you. It should be insulting. But this model is so ingrained.” Commentary such as this makes me seriously wonder whether this article is talking about lecturing, or just bad lecturing. Maybe I’m quick to defend the old style of education because I’m jaded by how talented the faculty was at my institution. I’ve never known a professor to stand in front of a room and read a textbook. I have many problems with the bureaucracy of my alma mater, but I’m pretty sure that if an instructor did that he would be immediately fired. Indeed, so should be such an instructor who does that at any university. The problem, though, is not that he’s lecturing, but rather that he’s lecturing with absolutely no effort.

A quotation from GWU biologist Hartmut Doebel elsewhere in the article speaks somewhat to my point: “If we want to get that whole human being out at the other end, we have to offer them a variety of experiences. And the lecture is part of it. I don’t think we will ever get away from it completely.”

Nor should be. Doebel’s commentary shouldn’t be so peripheral a notion as it is in the context of de Vise’s article. The notion of providing a variety of experiences for the sake of a complete education is a tragically groundbreaking concept. The value of diverse instruction should be obvious. I hope that it is obvious to the good instructors in the country, and that they’re not caught up in this ridiculous debate about whether they should be lecturing or doing something other than lecturing. I would expect that they would already be doing both.

Near the end, de Vise point out that “other scholars are working to improve, rather than replace, the lecture model.” Well thank God for that. Lecture or don’t lecture; I don’t really care. Whatever you do as a teacher, just do it well, for Heaven’s sake. Be malleable, recognize your own failings in the classroom, and reach out to your students. I’m sorry to be indelicate, but if students are failing in droves, the last thing I’d blame would be the institutional policy as to the structure of classes. It’s far more likely that either the teacher sucks as teaching or the students suck at learning. And as a rule of thumb, I’d advise that you assume the former if you’re the teacher, and assuming the latter if you’re a failing student.

At the conclusion of the article, de Vise gives a case study of destruction of lecturing. “Not all the ideas are new. At the University of Maryland College Park, engineering professors eliminated introductory lecture courses in 1991. Since then, students have spent the crucial first year engaged in actual engineering, building swing sets, helicopters and hovercrafts.”

I don’t understand. Why the hell weren’t they doing that before 1991? The problem was not the ineffectiveness of lecture courses, and the solution was not their elimination. The problem and the solution here is tailoring the content of the instruction to the needs of the class. Engineering students should be engineering. That seems pretty obvious. If you find that that doesn’t fit into a lecture model, very well, get rid of it. But just as easily, a portion of the classes could teach concepts and practices by lecture, so that students may apply the information that they obtain therein to the actual engineering that they do at home or in another portion of the classes.

It doesn't matter what means of instruction the professor chooses if he uses it well. The student will work to master the material if, but only if, he's genuinely committed to doing so.

Religion and Liberalism

Jacques Berlinerblau, writing recently for the Washington Post, provided a list of topics worth watching by those interested in the interplay of religion and politics. While it is an insightful list and the author’s knowledge of religious trends can’t be disputed, his first item seems to rely on a misunderstanding of activism coming from the political left. Berlinerblau anticipates what I believe is a very unlikely scenario – the union of Occupy movements with progressive people of faith. He writes:

“Ever since the rise of the religious right… observers have been wondering when (or if) the religious left would ever re-mobilize as a political force to be reckoned with.”

That parenthetical is important. I think that the question is indeed if it will, and that the answer is no. Religious institutions and religious people will not find a welcome place in liberalism, at least not without a major breaking point. It’s not as though there is any fundamental incompatibility between liberalism and religious belief, but virulently anti-religious atheists do comprise an extremely vocal minority of the liberal wing of American politics. Their input makes the landscape of liberalism very inhospitable to religion.

As a person who tends toward liberal thinking but also holds a degree in religious studies, I find this to be one of the more unfortunate elements of the modern liberal movement. I’ve heard liberal commentators flatly state that there’s no God, as if they had personally taken a complete tour of the cosmos and found it empty of a spiritual realm. Self-aggrandizing atheists tend to hold themselves up as being exceptionally resistant to the self-delusion of religionists, while failing to acknowledge that such a cock-sure rejection of so much as the remote possibility of the existence of a god is dogmatic in equal measure as religious belief.

And such brusquely dismissive attitudes also strike me as markedly illiberal, especially in light of the often annoying tendency of liberal movements to show no discretion in what voices it invites to contribute to its aggregate monologue. Berlinerblau for some reason entertains the possibility that the heirs to the Occupy Wall Street movement might allow “the progressive faith communities that eventually joined its ranks [to] come to play a pivotal role in [their] leadership or activism.” But why would a group that is actively shunned by a portion of the liberal movement come to have a managerial influence when no other has ever done so? Religious institutions are the last things I would expect to give direction to the movement, and I don’t expect anything whatsoever to do that.

Yet Berlinerblau continues his remarks by saying : “Were they to do so, fairly obvious synergies would develop around issues such as poverty, corporate greed, the environment, and health care, to name but a few.”

I have no doubt that that would happen, in theory. But synergies, no matter how obvious, are quite alien to liberal activist movements. They are characterized instead by a series of disjoint voices jostling together, generally being permitted their own agendas. Religion alone would tend to face a unique uphill battle as an exception to that trend, so if it aspires to a pivotal role, it will have enough difficulty contributing its own voice, let alone attempting to synthesize with those of other groups.

Presidential Charity is Misplaced

Back in 2009, some young man at a town hall meeting with president Obama earned his fifteen minutes of fame by standing up and expressing his frustration at the depleted job market he had faced after graduating college. I don’t remember what the president’s response on the spot, in front of the cameras was, but his ultimate response, and the one that caught the media’s attention and was remembered in the following days was that he got personally involved in that individual’s struggle and had his staff find the young man a job. At the time, the comedian Marc Maron was part of a web series that was being broadcast from the husk that then remained of Air America Media. The day after this story he joked that President Obama was going to fix the economy, and that he was going to do it one person at a time.

In promoting a new book by one of its reporters, Eli Saslow, the Washington Post recently reported that President Obama has written personal checks to some of the American citizens who have written to him detailing the problems they were facing. No doubt many will read this and take heart at the implication that the president is in touch with the common person, and that he genuinely cares about the struggles of his constituents, to the extent that he is willing to engage in a little bit of self-sacrifice to help them out.

I do not find this story inspiring. In fact, I think that such person-to-person humanitarianism from the president sends a terrible message. It is very specifically not the job of the government to help people on an individual basis. Perhaps the principal reason for government’s very existence is the notion that we can collectively solve those problems which we cannot solve individually. There’s a division between the two that needs to be recognized and respected, and I think that just about anything that cuts against it justifies and worsens the weakness of our government.

I assume and I hope that people who write to the president do so because they feel the need to weigh in on an issue of broad social significance. No doubt there are crackpots and self-important individuals who write to describe problems that are perfectly unique to them, but with ten letters selected for President Obama to personally read each day, I would hope that only the ones that frame the personal narrative in terms of why it’s significant to an issue that’s important to the country at large would make the final cut.

If I’m right in all of this, then the authors of these letters are generally trying to prompt the president to take action that will help those who are in their position, and not strictly them as individuals. Even if that’s not the case, that damn well should be exactly the lens through which the president views each letter. If one impacts him, he should set it down upon his desk and ask a simple question: “What can I, as the president, do to help Americans in the situation this letter describes?” When he is seated in the Oval Office, the question should never be, “What can I do to personally help the author of this letter?” That isn’t the president’s role, and it shouldn’t be.

I don’t want to think that any of my president’s energies are going into improving the lots of singular constituents when those constituents are individuals among massive collectives of people facing the same or worse difficulties. It would be heart wrenching to turn away from the individual, and it may even be wrong, but only if one believes that there are situations in which no course of action is the right one. Turning away from the individual is sadly necessary when your every purpose is to pursue and execute what is best for the good of an entire country. If the authors of letters to the president wanted someone to address their personal struggles directly, it would have been better of them to write to charitable organizations, or old acquaintances, or reality television producers. Writing the president for personal help risks a conflict of interest with the entire country, in that the interests of the collective society may sometime abut against the interests of the individual with that collective. The president’s focus belongs on one side of this and it should be exclusive.

This may sound callous, and some may get the impression that I am asserting that the president should be somehow disallowed from acting on the impulse of personal conscience and offering resources that he can afford to give to a place where they are needed. But I am certainly not claiming that the president should avoid charity in his capacity as leader of the nation. What I am suggesting is that if a letter deeply affects the president and fills him with a sense of urgency about getting involved, he ought to take any money that he would have offered to the individuals involved an instead give it to some sort of organization with the task of helping people facing the associated difficulties.

Solving individual problems is actually insufficiently ambitious for the president. There are other individuals and organizations that do or could have that as their particular function, and for such people solving the problem of one would be a sublime accomplishment. For the president, solving one person’s problem and failing to address the root cause of it is abject failure. Part of the symbolism of cutting a check to a specific individual is that the president is effectively acknowledging that he doesn’t have the tools at his disposal to fix the problem on a broader basis. If I were to ever receive a reply letter from the president, I would much prefer to read a note that says “Sit tight, the country is about to get better,” than to receive a check with a memo that says, “Momentary, personal fix.”

I remember actually being quite angry when that young man got a job by way of the good fortune of having Obama visit his town and being handed the microphone during the Q & A. My first impulse was to wonder about what the president was going to do now for the thousands of other college graduates, me among them, who couldn’t find work. Despite the human interest story of this one solitary man’s struggles being over, the fact was that the situation that created those struggles hadn’t changed a whit. And that being the case, on a certain level of analysis, the effect of helping that one man to find a job was that that job wasn’t available to someone else who needed one, and perhaps just as desperately.

I wonder, though, whether the president and his staff felt accomplished and satisfied when they helped that one individual. I suppose you have to hold onto those things when you have the world’s problems weighing on you personally every day. But there can be no justification for taking the optimistic view that comes of a narrow focus and thereby losing an appropriate sense of urgency about what needs to be done on a legislative level. The unfortunate truth is that when we’re all waiting for the social change that will take this overarching conditions away, doing individual good is sometimes a matter of just shuffling the misery around.

If that’s what you and I have to do, then so be it. We make the best of a bad situation. But the president, and especially this president, should be far better than that. There are a precious few people in the country who actually have the power to fix the conditions that keep the rest of us sharing that misery. If I am to have any faith in them whatsoever, I need to believe that they are not playing favorites among us and that escape from those conditions is not award by lottery to people who’ve had their letters read by the highest office in the land, while the rest of us wait for change forever.