Teaching Skeptics, 2.0

When students have already learned that knowledge is created collectively online and that no one lecturer has the answers, their approach to college changes. So too must professors’ pedagogy. Here’s an excerpt from one professor:

This is where many begin the blame game, and where I part ways with them. Polite, dutiful, and disengaged students deserve neither blame nor scorn. They have become exactly what one would expect of those born during the information age and reared in America’s profoundly pragmatic culture. They are, moreover, not all that different from the population as a whole. Aside from adopting new technologies more readily and accepting new familial patterns more quickly, they are very much America’s sons and daughters. Pinning a generational label on today’s students is unhelpful at best and a disservice to all.

A better and more productive response begins with us — faculty members and administrators. We cannot expect a skeptical populace to reverse course of its own accord. The onus is on us to better convey the value that a robust intellectual life adds to the public good. And we need to begin by respecting our students (and the wider public) not just as persons but as the arbiters of knowledge that they have become. Specifically, we must respect students as thinkers, even though their thinking skills may be undeveloped and their knowledge base shallow. Moreover, our respect must be genuine. Students have keen hypocrisy sensors and do not like being patronized.

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