Can a Captive Audience Learn?

...America has made little provision for these generous impulses and healthy strivings for adult status In fact, to send most youngsters on to higher education directly is not merely to frustrate them but to undermine the colleges For the rebellion against the academic curriculum is a product of both enforced attendance and its concomitant, painfully prolonged adolescence As Bruno Bettelheim has observed, "Campus rebellion seems to offer youth a chance to shortcut the time ol empty waiting and to prove themselves real adults what swifter and surer way to feel active than to become an activist...

...This has long been an exceedingly perplexing question Even students who are highly motivated and academically inclined may denounce them as elitist tools Yet the maintenance of standards, primarily through examination, is a university's way of giving meaning to itself by prescribing the minimum level of achievement necessary to earn its degrees Standards also serve to delineate the activities a school supports and pursues They specify how its resources are to be used, who is qualified tor appointment to the faculty or administration, who is a candidate for admission...

...BY MARTIN TROW BEHIND THE student rebellion against the universities and their forms of instruction?the requirements and lectures, the seminars and papers, the reading lists and laboratory assignments?lies the issue of involuntary attendance This rebellion m turn has had reverberations in the high schools, today the chief centers of violent disturbance in American education For their curricula and pedagogical styles, one cause at least of their turmoil, are m large measure fixed by the demands of higher education The high schools now must expect that almost all their students, even those not enrolled m college-preparatory programs, will consider attending college, whether immediately upon receipt of their diplomas or later By 1968 about half the secondary school graduates across the country were going directly to some form of higher education, around 60 per cent were entering after a delay In the upper and upper-middle classes and in states like California, the proportion reached nearly 80 per cent Many of the difficulties American colleges and universities are now experiencing reflect the strain of this transformation from what we may call mass to universal higher education In the early '60s, attendance at college was generally voluntary—a privilege that had in several places become a right, but not yet an obligation Whether seen as a privilege (in more selective, mostly private institutions) or a right (in less selective, mostly public institutions), voluntary attendance implied an acceptance of the school's character and purposes as defined by "the authorities " Although students could evade the trustees' or administrators' definition of education and its requirements, they rarely challenged it With the movement toward universal higher education, however, attendance has become increasingly "compulsory"—indeed, hardly less so than in the elementary and secondary schools The most visible of the forces constraining students to enter college is, of course, the draft, coupled with an unpopular war Yet other factors will outlast both the draft and the war the shame in not meeting the expectations of family and friends, the scarcity of attractive alternatives for 18-19 year-olds, the well-founded suspicion that the lack of college credits will disqualify them from rewarding jobs The result is that we are finding m our colleges large numbers of students who not only have no desire to be there, but also reject the values and even the legitimacy of the institution Part of the discontent that such involuntary attendance inevitably generates is available for mobilization around "political" issues Most of it, though, fuels student pressures against formal course requirements and grades, and for greater "flexibility" and " relevance" m the curriculum—that is, less dependence on books and more on experience There is a very clear parallel between what has been happemng to the college curriculum and what happened to the secondary school curriculum in the first two or three decades of this century In both instances the growth of involuntary attendance has been responsible for moving education away from the intrinsic logic of the academic disciplines and toward the interests that students bring to the classroom The necessity to motivate, rather than being able to assume motivation, compels the teacher to approach his material in ways that will "turn the student on " This may mean changes in the method of instiuction, it may mean new emphasis on certain aspects of the subject, it may mean more direct involvement of the students m determining the course content THE EVENTS following the Cambodian mvasion of May 1970 accelerated these trends on several of our leading campuses—not so much by changing academic attitudes and values as by revealing the fragile structure of the normative assumptions on which the university is based Patient inquiry, sequential development of ideas, emphasis on reasoned discussion and criticism, continual reference to evidence and the special attention to negative evidence, all are institutionalized in academic routines Cambodia demonstrated that for many young people these routines and the values they represent are "irrelevant'' Ot course, academic conventions had in some cases become unieffective and stultifying But large numbers of students simply seized upon the Cambodian adventure as an excuse to abandon their hated course-work for a fundamentally different kind of "university activity " Those who had been sullenly submitting to the "tyranny" of the curriculum suddenly discovered that they did not have to go to classes any more and, through various arrangements that were made for them, could continue to accumulate credits Cambodia can perhaps be seen as a landmark in the colleges' gradual shift (1) from books toward action, (2) fiom analysis and criticism toward affirmation and commitment, (3) from solitary study toward collective enterprise, (4) from the competitive pursuit of grades toward informal evaluations", (5) from what is seen as an and or spurious objectivity toward the moral gratifications of engagement Moreover, many students have come to demand that their teachers and institutions provide them with the ultimate meanings and values they previously found in their hentage, politics, religion, or whatever The traditional academic disciplines, which pursue knowledge rather than Truth and cultivate skepticism rather than conviction, cannot satisfy these inchoate yearnings for the absolute But there is certainly no scarcity ot teachers prepared to act as preachers and gurus to their chaiges Thus it is not apparent how or even whether the forms of teaching and inquiry that developed during the phases ot elite and mass higher education are to survive into the phase of universal highei education What are we to do with the millions of high school graduates who have hide academic inclination but great talent, intelligence and energy, who are ready for larger, more adult responsibilities and tasks than the colleges and universities allow, who want to put their energies at the service of the poor and despised m the interests of a more just society...

...Only a fraction of contemporary youth can achieve adult self-fulfillment through prolonged formal study While that proportion may be 10, 15, or even 20 per cent, it is certainly not 50-70' per cent of the age grade To recognize that most young men and women of college age are uninterested in scholarship, it should be stressed, is not to suggest that colleges be restricted to the upper and upper-middle classes In Britain, for example, access to higher education has been democratized through stipends and the like, reducing class differences in the student bodies oi an extremely selective (though rapidly expanding) univeisity system In the United States, the attack on unequal educational opportunities has for the most pait taken the form of increasing the number and size of institutions and hence the total number of places But even if enrollments eventually encompassed all high school giaduates, class (or race) differentials would continue to be manifested in the kinds of institutions that students of various origins would enter What would happen if we reversed the movement toward universal higher education...

...what they should be taught and how they should be tested In a bioader sense, standards define the boundaries of the institution—what it should not do as well as what it should be doing In a system of mass higher education, especially in the comprehensive colleges and universities that carry the main burden, these boundaries are quite wide But the movement toward universal higher education will require an even further relaxation and redefinition ot standards, at least m those institutions that hope to accommodate the enormously heterogeneous constituencies of the population at large For when institutions give academic credit for nonbookish" functions—job experience, field work, public service —or for more conventional studies carried on in loosely supervised ways, off campus or through "independent studies," standards become so vague as to be meaningless Britain's Open University, it will be argued, does not require attendance at on-campus courses, and its degrees are the equal of those of the country's other universities But one should remember thai the Open University is part of a system with demanding, common standards throughout Faculty members know those standards, are committed to them, and apply them with particular stringency to "external" students taking their degrees by examination Here there are no common standards among universities, indeed, this was one of the characteristics that made the expansion of our higher education so easy We cannot afford to further swell the range of activities rewarded with academic credits, to further blur the distinction between living and learning And if institutions distend their standards tor students in this way, how will they judge faculty...

...Our colleges and universities know how to hire instiuctors who are skilled in formal learning What mechanisms will enable them to hire tacultv skilled in life, or experience...

...The answer, I think, lies in the nature ot the alternatives created for young men and women, and in whether formal studies are available to them at later points in their lives If these become much more widespread, reducing the social coercion that dictates college attendance immediately after high school, then class differentials in higher education are likely to be greatly diminished Of the two broad sets of alternatives now emerging one is to continue "softening" the curriculum by fostering "relevance," easing requirements abolishing grades, etc , and so trying to gain and maintain the interest of involuntary students The second is to modify the patterns of advancement to higher education in ways that will increase the voluntariness of attendance (and thus the motivation) under conditions of universal access Some colleges and universities have begun to encourage high school graduates to work for a few years before enrolling, or to stop-out" during their college yeais Others are making it easier for adults to earn credits toward degrees while holding part-time or even full-time jobs And there is a lapidly growing interest in the open university idea of awarding credits and degrees by examinations and through courses taken oft campus via television or correspondence Because they tackle the problem of involuntary attendance directly by widening the pool of motivated students, these developments hold more promise for the future than does "reform" of the curriculum toward the presumed interests of a captive audience Nevertheless, the new approach to recruitment creates problems almost as difficult as those to which it responds, problems of standards, staffing, admissions, finance HOW TO ENFORCE academic standards...