Pre-1990’s College Nostalgia that Today’s Students Will Never Know Firsthand (Unless They Find a Time Machine)

By Susan L. Lipson

The Stacks: That’s what we called the top floor of the oldest library on campus, reached by climbing skinny metal staircases, where serious students studied silently among stacks of the dustiest library books and the ghosts of students past. The multisensory experience of leafing through heavy, hard-covered tomes in the dim light among crowded, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; hearing whispers and the sound of turning pages around the shelf corners; smelling the mustiness of yellowed pages longing to be aired out; and feeling the thin, onion-skin paper of delicate old books, in this once-revered section of the campus library — is this experience lost forever to college students of today and tomorrow, who now crouch over computers at cubicles, listening to music through headphones, in the new campus library world? …

by Susan L. Lipson

We continue to educate our American kids by forcing them into labeled boxes and expecting them to somehow learn on their own how to think outside boxes to succeed in job markets today. That makes no sense.

We focus on theoretical, rather than practical, education, as if our strictly standardized system truly develops young minds and sparks passion for continued learning (yeah, right). Thus, we discount “practical” education, based on knowledge that is actually needed to function in society, and on interests based on students’ passions and talents; we allow instead a system that implies that courses designed to train self-motivated young people for their chosen vocations (“vocational education”) have less value than academic ones. (This explains why a few young adults I know, who studied at prestigious universities and graduated with degrees in subjects for which they either had no passion or found no practical use in terms of a career, are now enrolled in vocational programs to learn advancing computer coding or graphic design or organic farming, etc.) Our theoretical learning system has no answer for the high school students who question the purpose of studying the quadratic formula when they have zero interest in mathematics or science. The traditional argument of education “experts” has been that many kids don’t know their interests yet and must be exposed to a wide variety of subjects so they can find their true inclinations. I accept that argument; however, exposure can be accomplished by offering generalized, survey-style courses on a pass-fail basis, to establish definite interests within subject areas, and thereby channel students toward electives (like trigonometry) that enable in-depth explorations of a subject. The nonsensical requirement of “general education,” as currently defined by American schools, even continues in most public universities and colleges—and students grudgingly agree to pay tuition for required classes that they have no desire to take, while they are limited in the number of electives they long to take! So-called “higher” education is no higher than its predecessor in terms of elevating the desire to learn for the sake of learning. Grading students in courses that will not benefit them in any way only discounts the interests and intelligence of kids, wastes time and brain power, and ignores the purpose of their education: to learn how to learn in order to grow into their best selves. …

by Susan L. Lipson

When I answer people’s questions about what my young adult kids (in their 20's) are doing, explaining that they are all pursuing their passions in “the arts,” I encounter reactions ranging from fascination with my rare parental species; to “And what about for their actual careers?”; …