Our Missing Education

A recent segment of a Bloggingheads.tv video, titled “ Are there still room for big questions in college?” involving William Deresiewicz, of Yale University, and Mark Edmundson, of the University of Virginia, discussed some of the issues within modern day universities.

The two men discuss how universities contain two types of students, leaders and thinkers. They come to the consensus that a leader is one who follows the system and openly accepts the ideas being fed to them by the institution. These are the students who become the alumni that give back donations to the university in order to keep it going. Thinkers, are the students who question everything, they refuse to acknowledge their universities ideas. While, it’s true that universities contain both leaders and thinkers, as mentioned by the Bloggingheads.tv video and nlopez’s article “what is worth teaching?”, both Bloggingheads and nlopez fail to accept that not every student is a leader or a thinker. There are those who are somewhere in between and these students also need to be accounted for in the discussion of leaders and thinkers.

Beline U’s article “ a leader is a thinker” takes a different approach to the whole idea of leaders and thinkers. She mentions that a leader IS a thinker. I found this quite interesting because the way leaders and thinkers were discussed in the video, the two sounded like polar opposites. How can two things on opposite sides of a spectrum be the same thing? Beline U says “the reason why leaders can never say or show what they are thinking is because it would cause chaos and there would be no leadership to stop it.” In this statement alone Beline U is contradicting her whole entire idea of leaders being thinkers. If a leader says what they are thinking then there really not much of a leader anymore, are they? A leader doesn’t need to think, they have the road already paved for them, and they just have to follow it. Again, Beline U makes a creative point which may in different cases be true, but not in the university spectrum.

Deresiewicz and Edmundson later move on to discuss the idea of students who go to elite universities not getting the personal support that they need in order to succeed in their studies. They suggest that teachers take time out of their busy schedules to have one on one time with their students. StephenSales article, “ schools need a personal touch” takes an effective rout towards solving this issue. StephenSales mentions how of course it’s difficult to make personal time for students at elite colleges for the professors have their own personal careers to worry about and time for students is just not possible in their busy schedules. The idea to talk about having this “one on one” time and writing about it is not enough. Action needs to be taken to help improve the ways in which students can have one on one time with their teachers. If a professor at an elite college cant make time some sort of personal time for their students, than maybe they shouldn’t be teaching at that school and rather take some time off to finish whatever project they are working on and return back when they feel they can make the essential time needed to personally educate their students.

A point made by WillPike in his article “I think I’m a leader (now with 99% more sense)” was that it’s a tragedy to have people specialize in one field. I think its tragedy for people who don’t specialize in one field. For example, if people spent their time becoming moderately talented in several fields, rather than focusing their time on becoming an excellent professional in one field, we would not have jobs or careers in the world today. This doctor kind of knows how to diagnosis his patients, but the part in med-school where they teach about diagnosis the doctor didn’t complete because he had left and decided to take up some graphic design classes. Being educated in several different fields isn’t a bad thing, it’s just that ultimately one field must rise above the rest and must be ones ultimate focus and specialty.

Ultimately, the problems presented by the Bloggingheads.tv segment about the issues with colleges today are quite valid, but fixing these issues would only open doors to other issues and so on and so forth. There is always going to be a “circular chain” of issues inside universities. We have to ultimately ask ourselves this, what is most important to improving our future? To answer this question there will be give and take involved between the universities and there students, but this is the best method to limit the problems that universities and students encounter with each other.