Newsflash: Not every undergrad is working towards a PhD!

I have never understood why in the many, many, public undergraduate universities like mine faculty teach courses as if every student in their classes is on track to do a PhD in the discipline.  Even the introductory courses are taught as if they are prep courses for that eventual doctorate.  The focus is on the jargon of the discipline, and not on the ideas.  Students are tested for how well they can recall from memory that jargon, instead of providing opportunities to students to demonstrate their thinking skills and understanding of the ideas.

If I were an undergrad in such a system, I would be puking day in and day out at the mere thought of going to such classes!

Do most faculty ever pause to think that very few students might ever make careers out of the academic jargon?  That very, very few would ever go to graduate school in that very field, even if the jargon did interest them?

To most students in the vast numbers of colleges and universities like mine, the BA/BS is the end of the formal education.  And then life teaches them a lot more.

Consistent with this understanding of mine, a few years ago, I started teaching my courses different from how they might be "conventionally" offered.

And a lot more differently after I was sure I was tenured :)

I started putting together my own list of readings.  During discussions, I ask students related questions that might pertain to other disciplines.  Examples?  When discussing the geographic patterns in resources, which is a standard topic in economic geography, I might ask them to describe natural gas as a chemical.  What is the main gas there?  What is its chemical formula?  Or, when we talk about alternative energy sources, I might ask them for the difference between nuclear fission and fusion.  More than once, I have had students work on term papers by analyzing the concepts explored in short stories.  I bring in movie clips to highlight issues. 

The work that students turn in indicate that I have not sacrificed anything when it comes to the formal academic rigor and what they need to know by taking the courses.  And, I get a lot more: they begin to see that knowledge is all interconnected, which is how the world functions too.  Once, in class when we talked about the energy that goes into transporting food, and the energy derived from that food when we consume it (an important controversy in the locavore movement), it was fascinating to watch students duke it out on whether or not energy is energy, or whether energy in transportation is different from the energy in food.

Which is why I liked the following paragraphs in this blog post where a liberal arts college professor writes about how his syllabi often have materials from disciplines other than his own:

Foundations aren’t whole buildings, though, and creating the entire foundation that you’d need for a skyscraper when all you’re going to build in the site is a modest ranch home is a wasteful and stupid thing to do.
Faculty need to work for students who are really certain that they’re going to need the deepest foundation. But it’s more important to offer the smaller footprints for the larger group of students, or maybe even just to provide some building materials from your discipline that are an accompaniment to work in a completely different field or profession or to a well-lived life. So that’s why I often do teach materials from other specializations and other disciplines and from outside academia, with relatively careless regard for the deep foundations that generated some of that material.

Yep.

But, there is a downside: "mashed potatoes" :)

And then we wonder why the dominant approach to education invites criticisms like this!

I’m reminded of a point made by Andrew Rosen of Kaplan, the for-profit education company, that colleges today know more about how many kids attend basketball games and which alumni give money than how many students showed up for economics class during the week, or which alumni are having a hard time meeting their career goals because of shortcomings in their education.

That needs to change.

I certainly don't need education of the sort that is often provided anymore.  Thankfully, I am not 19, or even worse: 13!