Is Anybody Listening? I. Criticism of American colleges and universitiesA. tea

Is Anybody Listening?
    Good morning, everybody. Today, I’d like to talk about the problems with lecture classes.
    Today, American colleges and universities are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers, it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and students are not doing a good job of learning. (1) American businesses and industries suffer from uncreative executives educated not to think for themselves but to mouth outdated truisms. (2) College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation worse.
    One aspect of American education is the lecture system. To understand the inadequacy of this system, it is enough to follow an imaginary first-year student—let’s call her Mary—through a term of lectures on, say, introductory psychology. She arrives on the first day and looks around the huge lecture hall. (3) Once the hundred or more students enrolled in the course discover that the professor never takes attendance, the class shrinks to a less imposing size.
    Some days Mary sits in the front row, from where she can watch the professor read from a stack of yellowed notes that seem nearly as old as he is. She is bored by the lectures, and so are most of the other students, to judge by the way they are nodding off or doodling in their notebooks. Gradually she realizes the professor is as bored as his audience. At the end of each lecture he asks, "Are there any questions?" in a tone of voice that makes it plain that he would much rather there weren’t.
    Mary knows she should read an assignment before every lecture. (4) However, as the professor gives no quizzes and asks no questions, she soon realizes she needn’t prepare. At the end of the term she catches up by skimming her notes and memorizing a list of facts and dates. After the final exam, she promptly forgets much of what she has memorized.
    Does the scene sound familiar to you? I bet it does. (5) One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter becomes clear to them. (6) Even simply paying attention is very difficult; people can listen at a rate of 460 words a minute, while the most impassioned professor talks at scarcely a third of that speed. This time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have sabotaged their attention span, but their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think.
    Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and then have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. (7) While it’s true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker’s next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word.
    Students need to question their professors and to have their ideas taken seriously. Only then will they develop the analytical skills required to think intelligently and creatively. Most students learn best by engaging in frequent and even heated debate, not by scribbling down a professor’s often unsatisfactory summary of complicated issues. (8) They need small discussion classes that demand the common labors of teacher and students rather than classes in which one person, however learned, propounds his own ideas.
    (9) The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. (10) Questions that require the speaker to clarify obscure points and comments that challenge sloppily constructed arguments are indispensable to scholarship. Without them, the liveliest mind can become weak. Undergraduates may not be able to make telling contributions very often, but lecturing insulates a professor even from the beginner’s naive question that could have triggered a fruitful line of thought.
    (11) If lectures make so little sense, why have they been allowed to continue? (12) Administrators love them, of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than into a discussion class, and for many administrators that is almost the end of the story. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture system alive and well. Lectures are easier on everyone than debates. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as students can pretend to learn by attending lectures, with no one the wiser, including the participants. (13) Moreover, if lectures afford some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off.
    Then, what can be done to make things good? Well, I think (14) smaller classes in which students are required to involve themselves in discussion put an end to students’ passivity. Students become actively involved when forced to question their own ideas as well as their instructor’s. Their listening skills improve dramatically in the excitement of intellectual give-and-take with their instructors and fellow students. Such interchanges help professors do their job better because they allow them to discover who knows what. When exams are given in this type of course, they can require analysis and synthesis from the students, not empty memorization. (15) Classes like this require energy, imagination, and commitment from professors, all of which can be exhausting. But they compel students to share responsibility for their own intellectual growth.
    Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university scene both because they seem to be economically necessary and because they spring from a long tradition. But the lectures too frequently come at the wrong end of the students’ educational careers—during the first two years, when they most need close, even individual, instruction. If lecture classes were restricted to junior and senior undergraduates and to graduate students, who are less in need of scholarly nurturing and more able to prepare work on their own, they would be far less destructive of students’ interest and enthusiasm than the present system. After all, students must learn to listen before they can listen to learn.
    OK. That’s all for today’s talk. Thank you!