It’s not the density of information. It’s the end goal of the process. Students are only given motivation to learn for a career and people have figured out that most jobs are bullshit. If they can bullshit their way though college, they can bullshit their into a career. When layoffs are done by lottery, it’s not even like the sincere students can be safe. It’s bullshit stacked on top of other bullshit.

I’m all for letting children be children, but this article is about college students who are, generally speaking, supposed to be adults.

How do we expect students to want to learn when the point of school is to get a piece of paper that says you get paid more?

People care about their careers, because that’s what’s going to let them survive, they don’t care about the journey to getting to the point of stable survival.

If school wasn’t about getting done as fast as possible so you can go make money, if people didn’t have to constantly minmax their time and money, then people would actually want to learn and go to school.

So I’m a flight instructor. I–unlike a shocking number of college professors–was taught how to teach.

Today’s subject: Thorndike’s principle of readiness. Students learn best when they’re ready to learn. What does it mean to be ready to learn? Well, we turn to Maslowe and his hierarchy of needs.

If you took a Psych 150 class, you probably studied Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs as a pyramid, with the wide base layer being the physical needs like food, water, moderate temperatures, sleep etc. then the safety and security layer, then the social layer, on up to the “self actualization” layer at the peak which presumably means becoming a Star Trek TNG character. This model is a bit flawed because it prescribes one set of priorities for all people, at all times. But it’s useful I suppose as a model to start from, and it will do for us.

As a teacher, you have to ask yourself: What need on my students’ pyramid is my lesson going to serve? If you’re a Russian literature teacher or something, that “need” is probably pretty high up the pyramid, right? You’ve got to have a lot of the rest of your life pretty thoroughly solved before you go “I’m sick of novels written in the Latin alphabet, let’s give one of the ones in Cyrillic a try.”

Is that where most undergraduates are in their lives?

No; the majority of them have just had their social lives upended by graduating from high school, having most of their childhood friends and acquaintances move away and now having to make new friends, quite often having physically moved themselves to a new town away from their parents and support networks. Many of them are falling chin first into doing domestic chores for themselves, learning how to feed themselves, wash their clothes etc. A number of them have dependents already and have to work to support them, others simply have to work to feed themselves.

Why are they even here? Well, they’ve been told–lied to, really–that sitting through four years of your shit will somehow cause employers to pay them more. A woman in a UNC lanyard walked into a high school class I was taking to assert exactly that complete with a Powerpoint presentation full of charts.

Your gaggle of undergraduates is also likely in significant debt. They might have walked into that career center that their campus tour guide made such a big deal about maybe trying to arrange an internship or something only to be handed the classifieds page out of the local paper, or gone to one of those pointless career fairs at which no one ever seems to get hired.

And in amongst all that, there stands the humanities professor, more self-important than the Baptist god, bitching about students using ChatGPT to write their essays.

I didn’t really have much of a problem with that teaching flight school. First of all, all of my students wanted to be there. Nobody goes to flight school for resume candy, they do it because they want to fly a plane. Genuine curiosity in the subject will put students most of the way through the textbook themselves, when I was a flight student I’d ignore high school or college textbooks to read my flight school books. But then you’ve got things like the weather. Meteorology is boring and dense, especially given all the abbreviations they cram into it. It is the teacher’s job to demonstrate why this is important to the student. “So you don’t crash and die” often does the job.

You’re right, if there’s anything wrong with education in the US, it’s that we do too much of it 🙄