i mentioned that, when i returned to college after working full-time, i was horrified by how little was being done in business schools to prepare students for their careers.  That was the 1970s!  Very little has changed since then.  To give you an idea, consider what the CEOs of some of Fortune magazine’s “Top 100 Companies to work for” look for in hiring new employees.

Just taking one of those, the CEO of the 6th best company to work for is looking for candidates who possess:  “Curiosity, humility, collaboration, passion for their field, and the desire and drive to accomplish something great.”  Most experts in developmental and cognitive psychology agree that these are all things that can be learned.  So the question is:  Is higher education – and more specifically, the PCSB – creating classrooms where its students can learn, practice, then develop these?  If not, then what are our students learning?

Generally, in college, learning refers to the following process:

• reading / studying information presented in the course, then
• demonstrating retention of that information through class assignments.

It’s a simple, straightforward process, one that can involve many different classroom strategies and techniques, from lectures to engaging experiential exercises.  It is remarkably efficient from the standpoint of college administration.  But there is a problem when it comes to learning, as opposed to simply retaining information short-term.  Research in higher education consistently shows that even students who retain much of the information in the short term, forget most of it after a few months. It is not unusual for specific studies to show that after just a few weeks, almost half of the information is forgotten. After 12 months how much information is retained can be as low as 15-20%.  A question that occurs then, is:  If we are taking all these classes yet forget most of what we retained, why are we taking those particular classes?

Learning, as opposed to taking in information, involves understanding, and that usually comes from being able to take the information presented and applying it in real-world situations.  That information becomes knowledge through practicing applications to the point where we don’t forget, even if we stop using that knowledge for awhile.

As an example, think about riding a bicycle.  We could take a class where we learn all about bikes:  their history, their parts and how they work together, the physics of cycling, perhaps even biology as it pertains to competitive bicycle racing.  We could read stories on the great cyclists.  And then we could take exams, write papers, and give speeches on what we have learned.  A question is:  What have we actually learned about riding a bike?

That takes getting on the damned thing – usually with Mom or Dad hanging on to the back of the seat – and riding.  Until you fall off.  Then repeat.  And if you do get to where you can ride without assistance, the rest of your life you will know how to ride, even if you don’t do so for many years.

Isn’t that what education should be?  Shouldn’t it involve knowledge and skills that you can use successfully the rest of your lives?  Honestly, i would never pay a quarter of a million dollars to do the same things i could do by myself in libraries and online.  Especially when universities like MIT offer all of their courses online.  For free!  But i would pay $250,000, and more, if i came out of four years with knowledge and skills that i can use for success, the rest of my life.

To be fair, you will learn things here.  There are important lessons in getting along with people and learning what to do when you don’t get along with others.  Being separated from families, you learn about balancing freedom and responsibility.  You’ll likely learn a lot about yourself.  Many will mature a great deal in your four years.  Attending this particular college, we hope you will come away with a strong sense of personal ethics.

However, since my role is in the classroom, i am more interested in what you learn in classes and how those experiences integrate with the personal, social, spiritual, and aspirational.

Susan Blum, anthropologist at Notre Dame, refers to this traditional approach (what more non-politically correct faculty often refer to as “academic binge-and-purge”) as “learning in the cage.”  Students usually have no say in what they study in a given class, how they go about demonstrating how much they retain, and how they will be judged.  There are so many constraints, it usually feels like one is caged.  Under such conditions, it is rare to find a student who likes these conditions.  Is it then any wonder why so little information is retained?  The way it is presented in most classes, it seems to have very little to do with you personally.  As a result, it is just not important to you.  And it is not you.  That’s the way everyone is.

There is a significant disconnect between learning in a cage and the way humans learn naturally.  Think of the things that have fascinated you to the point where – when first hearing of them – you simply needed to know more.  You took it upon yourself to find out more about it.  Asking questions and reading and viewing and listening and studying about it in no way resembled what you did when you prepared for those Civ exams.  If your curiosity and interest deepened with your research, you started telling everyone else about it.  Those as interested in you became your students; you, their teachers.  And it was all natural, things you did without realizing that’s what you were doing.  And you did it without anyone telling you what to do, how to do it, by what deadline, or judging how well you did it.

In contrast to schooling, Blum refers to this approach – the way we all learned as babies, the way we learn about things we find fascinating – as “learning in the wild.”

Questions

So here are some very important questions for us, concerning this class:

• Is it possible to create a class based on learning in the wild?  It might be hard to conceive, given that in “wild learning,” each person follows her or his own rules and guidelines (note:  as you will see, this is not a good reason for giving up completely on the idea of a “wild” class).
• How can we minimize the aspects of the cage?
• How can we maximize “wild” learning?
• What is the balance between cage and wild for the specific group of people in your class?

Even though you were just introduced to these ideas, you likely have some thoughts about them, questions of your own, perhaps even some responses to these questions.  Given that one thing we simply must overcome in this class is the notion of a “right” answer, this could be a good first practice of using your voice.  So – again it is optional – but if you accept the challenge of responding on this issue, please use the comments to do so.