originally published 12/1/2008

Tim Clydesdale, author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School (Chicago University Press, 2007), discusses the experience of freshmen year at college. He reflects on his own experience of leaving home and coming to Wheaton and joining a community of scholars of the wider world, and he contrasts his experience with the research he collected over a year of study contemporary freshmen. For many students through primary and secondary schools, the dominant paradigm of learning is bulimic: studying and gaining knowledge is for the sake of checking off boxes on the way to getting somewhere, as opposed to enjoying studies and being nourished in their minds as part of a process of maturation. After taking in the minimum amount of information necessary, students then regurgitate the information back at teachers. By the time they enter college, Clydesdale suggests they’ve been effectively inoculated against a love of knowledge, and professors face an uphill battle to teach them to learn. He connects this mode of learning with a particular American moral culture that is skeptical and antagonistic of authority. In this culture, students are the autonomous arbiters of moral knowledge, deciding what is good or evil without regard to moral authorities, if they are even recognized as such. Similarly, students are the autonomous arbiters of their education, the final judge of what ought to be learned or not, and authorities are distrusted in comparison to the self. Clydesdale connects this moral culture to a suspicion of history and a bias toward the new, as well as to the centrality of niceness in college society. Instead of cultivating reflection on the deep questions of meaning and life, students are overwhelmed with developing and using techniques to manage their lives without reference to the ends or purposes toward which their lives should be oriented.

When this feature was released on Volume 94 of the Journal, it was preceded by an interview with Mark Bauerlein that dealt with related themes. An Archive Feature of that interview is available here.

21 minutes

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