Ignorance is bliss
McGowan, Jo
OF SEVERAL MINDS JO McGOWAN IGNORANCE IS BLISS U.S. college students in India There is nothing like meeting a college student for getting a sense of popular culture. My husband and I, who...
...Our job is to organize a nine-week, academic, classroom-based course, interspersed with field trips and cultural events, which culminates in a four-week field placement in a development organization...
...Unconditional love, yes, and the assurance that all her needs will be met (as far as possible), whether this is convenient for the parents or not...
...Occasionally we encounter a real expert in a subject on which we are holding forth and the result can be ludicrous...
...He let me go on at great length about the dangers of radiation and the half-life of nuclear waste material—I quoted from half-understood leaflets with what I thought was brilliant effect—before finally revealing himself...
...This does not seem to be the case in the United States where children are given enormous importance and respect, where they are deferred to and often asked to contribute to family decision making...
...What seems to amuse those in the know is the way people latch on to the terms, confusing the part for the whole...
...society today, where the sheer wealth of mediagenerated material on every conceivable subject makes most people believe they are reasonably well-informed about a wide variety of issues...
...That they do not seem to be, in spite of having excellent grades, is an interesting comment on the present system of education in the United States...
...students, however, I now find myself more sympathetic to a system of education that demands a person know something before he speaks...
...Electricity is known generically as "light...
...The problem with this approach is the importance given to cognitive development at a time when the cognitive is relatively unimportant...
...This conflicts sharply with the Indian view...
...university students, I am beginning to wonder if I haven't burdened my children with decisions they have neither the competence nor the need to make...
...They are often bored to the point of tears as the teacher drones on, never challenged or questioned...
...he asks incredulously...
...One of our first surprises was that the students view their professors as equal partners...
...They need to know that their parents are always there for them, managing their lives and taking care of business so that they can get on with being kids...
...While most of them are willing to concede that the teacher may have more information on the subject at hand, this confers no special status, nor does it render his opinions any more valuable than their own...
...What is surprising is their continued insistence that they are well-informed...
...Any intravenous drip, for example, is invariably referred to as "glucose...
...But her opinion is never requested, and she is expected to mind her own business and not interfere in adult affairs...
...Will they go through life believing that every individual's opinion is as valuable as the next person's, regardless of experience, knowledge, wisdom, or spiritual depth...
...Here in India, educated people are often amused by the efforts of uneducated people to use terms they clearly do not understand...
...After they've read a few copies of Time or Newsweek and sat through a newsmagazine-type television program or two, a whole range of topics—the situation in Kosovo, the fighting in Kashmir, genetic engineering, euthanasia, and the latest breakthrough in computer technology—are all checked off the list and considered understood...
...One of the inevitable side effects of such a system is a generation of students unable to think for themselves...
...The problem goes way back, perhaps to the way they were treated as children...
...The problem goes beyond typical undergraduate arrogance and seems to reflect a common situation in U.S...
...I have always felt more enlightened than he in my respect for them as individuals...
...It is, however, something we all do, all the time, but in such an intelligent, articulate way as to fool both ourselves and most of the people we meet...
...In my rabid antinuke days, when I based my arguments mainly on moral indignation, I was once picked up while hitchhiking by a man who turned out to be a nuclear physicist...
...My husband and I, who live in northern India, have just taken on a project in collaboration with a university in the United States that sends students to India...
...Small children require emotional security first...
...This is not surprising: They really know next to nothing about the material...
...Why are you asking them...
...But I do not blame the students...
...For us, it has been fascinating to see how U.S...
...I have done this sort of stuff with my own children and it has been a source of amazement to my Indian husband...
...students view education and to discover some of our own biases...
...This is the dream that most of our students come to India holding, and they are convinced that the conclusions they come to, based purely on their own extremely limited experiences here, will somehow be both wise and correct...
...But now, seeing the results in the form of these U.S...
...Commonweal 9 December 3,1999...
...This might be possible if they were older, and would be even more likely if they were solidly grounded in their own disciplines...
...But when the subjects are opened for discussion, the students' comments betray an almost blissful ignorance and superficiality...
...Will they, like the students, end up believing they are perfectly equipped to give their opinion on whatever subject, simply because they have one...
...Here the teacher is the repository Commonweal 8 December 3,1999 of all wisdom and the student is simply meant to receive...
...I shudder at the idea...
...The value of studying in a foreign country (particularly one as foreign as India) may lie chiefly in the experience of being totally without reference points, of being compelled to see things as if for the first time, and to come to conclusions based not on the past but on the immediate present...
...Confronted with the opposite approach of the U.S...
...The visiting American students, when presented with the lectures our professors think necessary—given the students' near total unfamiliarity with Indian history, geography, politics, culture, and religion—complain of mind-numbing boredom and even, to quote one of them, "oppression...
...An American living in India, I have been highly critical of this view, especially as my own children have moved through the school system...
...One of the big differences in the Indian style of child rearing and the American is that in India the child is given very little control, or even pretense of control...
...Instead, in the United States they are solemnly consulted about where the family should go on vacation and required to negotiate with their parents as to the size of their allowance and the time they must go to bed...
Vol. 126 • December 1999 • No. 21
