The Dialogue

Question: Do today's college students respect learning as much as college students respected learning in the past?

Yes, students and professors together can make sure learning is respected.
Elizabeth Hoffman*

When things don't go well, our first impulse is often to blame the students: They just don't care about math or literature---or whatever subject---the way students used to. This mythological past, populated with students always ready to learn, never existed, of course. We who teach may remember ourselves as perfect students, but we probably weren't. I certainly wasn't. Just like students today, sometimes I was diligent in my studies and sometimes I wasn't.

What I must remember now, as a teacher, is that, when I was a student, what motivated me to learn was not some abstract respect for learning. What motivated me were individual teachers who found ways to make me believe that what they taught was worth knowing.

Those teachers respected my intelligence enough to demand that I work with them to meet high standards of scholarship. If our students sometimes appear to be cynical or uncooperative, we need to convince them that what we have to offer has value and that learning is a mutually reinforcing process.

Part of the answer is for teachers to work collaboratively, with people in our disciplines or outside our disciplines, with teachers from secondary and elementary schools, or with business and community leaders.

Through collaborative efforts, we can create an environment of teaching and learning based on knowledge and mutual respect, a model we can then apply in our classrooms to help our students achieve academic excellence in this increasingly complex and confusing world.

* Elizabeth Hoffman, a lecturer at California State University, is on the Board of Directors of the California Faculty Association.

{short description of image} No, most students today see learning as a purely practical matter.
Kay Carr *

In today's increasingly corporate higher education environment, students are encouraged to think and view learning solely in terms of its relationship to future job opportunities.

This is happening in a nation where inequality in the distribution of wealth is approaching levels not seen since the "Robber Baron" era of the late 19th Century. Today's students are savvy enough to see what society values---and to scramble to join the ranks of the wealthy.

In this atmosphere, students routinely claim to have little time for classes that will not give them practical knowledge.

Many professors find this attitude incredibly frustrating. How can tomorrow's leaders, many faculty ask, be so ignorant about the joys of learning and the need to thoughtfully address the world's problems?

My answer: It's easy for students to ignore the moral implications of competing to become a "have" in a system that depends on an ever-expanding number of "have-nots."

Students today argue they have no choice but to concentrate only on knowledge that will guarantee their own economic advancement. Anything else, they say, will doom them to poverty.

I consider countering this attitude, this futile corporate optimism, to be one of my tasks as a professor. Students who forsake real learning, I believe, will most likely end up as "have-nots" because they haven't taken the time to learn how to think. Students who do not respect learning can attain knowledge to follow others, but not to lead the world.

* Kay J. Carr, an associate professor of history, is president of the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Faculty Association.

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