College Visits: Exciting yet...

College visits are a mixture of excitement, dread, and uncertainty.  I went with my oldest daughter this week to visit the campus and program she has her eye on.  The university was clean and well run with an impressive dining hall.  We were given the opportunity to sit in on a class in her desired major.  The professor was impressive.  He had a wealth of experience and shared a myriad of interesting anecdotes.  What was not impressive was the lack of student engagement.  

For 50 minutes, he stood in front of the class and talked passionately about a subject he loved and tried to infuse that same excitement into his students.  Yet, the types of questions he asked his students were solely definition questions.  What is this?  What does that term mean?  There were no cause and effect relationships, what is happening at the same time, or is it possible type queries.  He never invoked an authority outside his own experience or compared a term or concept to something the students might already known or experienced.  

Of the sixteen students in the class, only four participated in any noticeable way.  Everyone kept their coats on, heads down, and laptops open.  But the lead balloon moment for me was when he passed out a card for each student that he had collected from them at the beginning of the semester.  This was week 16 of his class with the final the next week.  Of the sixteen students he could only identify four of them in the class even though he had their name on the card he was passing back to them.  He would call out their name and then look helplessly around the room waiting for someone to raise a hand.  

It is hard to know what to make of this.  The professor had greeted my daughter and I warmly by name when we entered the class, and yet he didn’t know who his students were after 16 weeks.  The students hadn't wrestled with anything of substance and were not asked to do anything other than passively receive projected slides and stories.  

Through the experience I have had in our educational programs, I had hoped for more in higher education.  But it does seem like I am signing my daughter up for a mass-produced product which ends up treating children as objects rather than subjects.  I am so appreciative of her thirteen years of experience in the inefficient and relational classical classroom with small class sizes, an expectation for conversations, regular presentations by students, memorized speeches, and other active learning experiences where everyone in the classroom is moving with the content rather than listening to one speaker.  There is something sacred, set apart, and worth preserving that happens in education when students are invited into the dance rather than solely acted upon. I pray for a renaissance in education where children are offered the opportunity to practice important skills and at the same time inspired to imitate the brightest examples humanity has to offer.

I am excited for my daughter but at the same time I have a sense of loss that her time in a dynamic, challenging, and integrated classical classroom is coming to an end.