Are we failing students where it matters most?

They come eager to learn, eager to study, eager to get good grades. Graduation day comes, their hats fly, their smiles shine and we’re all celebrating. Time to finally get started, right? WRONG!

photo credit: Karl Fredrickson

We live in an age were employment has never been so unnervingly complex and fast-paced. Long, long, long gone are the days were a university degree from a respected institution was an almost guaranteed ticket to a top-notch job, brimming over with benefits and a hefty retirement plan. Today, relevance is the name of the game and in such an economic environment, ex-students who are not naturally inclined to thrive out of their comfort zones tend to suffer the most. Those who are avid, life-long learners, optimists, risk-takers, non-conformers and critical thinkers on the other hand enjoy the ride.

I feel that the entire education industry is still, sadly, bogged down in the 1990’s. We award good studying, good memorization, good exam scores. Yet we know that this kind of academic success is woefully inadequate in the real world. In this turbo-charged, digital information age, where it takes literally seconds to access the most sophisticated knowledge out there does it really matter if you know your text-book stuff well? I tell it to my students all the time, what’s in your text-books today may not be so tomorrow. So why are we still attached to the antiquated modalities of knowledge?

Perhaps the time has come to drastically redraw our teaching strategy. Our goal can no longer be to impart facts that are rapidly replaced almost as soon as they graduate by updated ‘versions’. We need to teach students to think, to dream, to rise. We need to teach students above all, that they can learn, and learn to love, any subject they set their sights on.

The future belongs to those who can embrace all the intricacies of a world so mind-bogglingly connected and we, as professors, may very well be the only thing that prevents them from learning all this the hard way.

Marc Mikhael, PhD

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