Open wide
Got an interesting email today that is Dr. Thomas Reeves' account of teaching students at an open-admission university. I have no link for the article, the title of which is, "My Experience Teaching Apathetic Students at a School with Open Admissions" so I'll quote at length:
"Since 1970 I have taught history at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, in Kenosha. This campus admits 95 percent of its applicants and boasts in newspaper ads that acceptance can be granted almost immediately. In the fall of 2000, only 8 percent of its incoming freshmen ranked in the top ten percent of their high school class. A whopping 42 percent ranked in the bottom half of their high school class...[by 1994] the number of all incoming freshmen graduating after four years was a mere 12 percent.
"Teaching American history for more than thirty years at Parkside has given me the opportunity to learn much about the dynamics of open admissions in higher education. Speaking with other faculty, locally and at similar campuses across the country over the decades, in my own academic discipline and in others, I've become convinced that my experiences are by no means unusual. What I have seen going on in the world of open admissions education I call "The Classroom Game."
"Since I teach two introductory survey courses every semester in American history, let me begin there. One quickly learns that the young people signed up for 101 and 102 (the chronological break between the courses at Parkside is 1877) know virtually nothing about the history of their own nation. They have no grasp of colonial America...or the nation's constitutional machinery. All religion baffles them (no doubt a tribute to the secularism dominant in modern public schools), all intellectual history eludes them, and politics bores them. Even after instruction, they often confuse World War I and World War II... Almost all of the students simply refuse to memorize the Chief Executives in their proper chronological order. In fact, they choose to ignore dates of any kind; written exams rarely contain any.
"This proud ignorance rests on a seemingly invincible anti-intellectualism...These amiable, polite, almost invariably likeable young people read little or nothing. In a class of 50, not more than one or two read a newspaper daily; what tiny grasp they have of current events comes from television news. Reading books and magazines outside the classroom is not something they would even consider doing. In short, they have no intellectual life and see no need for one.
"How much reading should be assigned? I have dropped my standards over the years by two-thirds. Still, I am routinely described as extremely demanding...Yielding somewhat to the pressure, in 102 not long ago I assigned 20 pages a week in my own textbook, a brief history of America in the twentieth century. A senior sociology major informed me angrily that no one else among her professors that semester was so demanding. Twenty pages a week. The experiment in minimal reading ended in failure: students still wouldn't complete the assignment.
"In 102, I recently added an Internet requirement. I devoted considerable time to finding relevant web pages, many containing photographs and filmsof major people and events covered in class. Since young people spend a great deal of time at the computer, I assumed this would prove popular. Most of my students simply refused to do it. I could generate no interest in the assignment at all. Many young people, apparently, do not consider education a valid function of the Internet."
And on, and on, and depressingly on. When no standards are required for college admission, it is no surprise that the college classes will have to be dumbed down to satisfy those who cannot meet even minimum standards. But flunking students is now an unpopular act, and the results of this on open-admission students is predictable:
"The Classroom Game, then, is about gaining academic credits while successfully resisting education...The professor, fearing the student evaluations that are taken seriously by many faculty and administrators at this level of academia, and increasingly weary of clinging to intellectual standards long abandoned by colleagues in their quest for popularity and security, often winds up caving in and giving the students what they want, including high grades. (The sciences are less likely to succumb than the liberal arts and social sciences, but the "dumbing down" is in evidence everywhere.)...
"The Game decrees that majors will receive good grades, regardless of their effort. Disciplines need majors. Without them, the Department members would be teaching nothing but survey courses and would be less able to successfully request additional funds and faculty...Fortunately for the students, graduation requirements have continued to drop in recent years all across the nation and at all levels. Only two percent of the colleges and universities require a history course of any kind.
"The destructive impact of Open Admissions and The Classroom Game on the quality of higher education should be obvious. The demonstrable drop in educational standards over the past forty years has been tragic. But what about the effect on students? What about the countless thousands of young people who flunk out or drop out every year when they realize that they cannot handle even the minimal standards that face them?"
Guess the educrats will call for more "self-esteem" training then.