There is something in the training or experience of college history professors that conditions them to believe that they should be able to communicate basic facts and simple ideas accurately and clearly to almost any student audience. Thus, it comes as a surprise when, for example, after lecturing in detail on the development of the atomic bomb and supervising a lively discussion on its initial use, a student writes in a subsequent examination that the weapon was first used in 1975 when the United States won the Vietnam War.
All too often the first response of the conscientious teacher is to wring the hands and ask, “What did I do wrong, and how could I teach this material differently so that all of my students can understand it?” And even the most self-critical professor will usually have a secondary response that gets more to the point of the error: “How could any college student have lived in this country for eighteen years without registering the connection between the atomic weapon and Japan?” How indeed?
Further, what can be learned about students and their attitudes and approaches to college in general and history in particular that they can make such astonishing errors? These are the questions I would like to explore in this article.
It is important when contemplating the learning process of traditional-aged college students to accept the fact that there are many forces operating on their lives which have shaped their academic habits. Ideas and behaviors were formed over eighteen years of life and twelve of formal education, and most students spend about twelve waking hours away from the influence of their well-intentioned, hardworking professors. Having an hour of the students’ time every day or so over a ten- to fifteen-week term, cannot overcome the non- or even anti-scholastic forces in their lives. Teachers should consequently not be too shocked that students can make severe blunders. By studying the errors that students make and by trying to categorize them, I have moved away from simple hair-pulling to a more productive approach for understanding the students of the 1980s and the particular obstacles they put in the way of their instructors.
This essay uses examples from my introductory world civilization exams, but I wish to emphasize that the types of errors I have identified are not exclusive of students at my school, a state-supported senior college. After numerous lengthy conversations with colleagues from every region, I am sure that these problems are not local, regional, or even national (a professor at Cambridge—England, not Massachusetts—was complaining to me about the howlers he was finding in student papers); they are not limited by gender, race, or socio-economic status.
(Note: in order to preserve anonymity of students, I will use the variations of the pronoun “he” as gender neutral. Most spelling errors have been corrected.)
Type 1. “The Romans honored their kings by building great pyramids for them to be buried in.” “Dr. Livingstone was found in the jungle by Lenin.” These errors are perhaps the simplest, or the most easily explained. After my colleagues and student witnesses have absolved me of making some inadvertent remarks that may have misled these students to send Lenin to the Congo and Khufu to Rome, I can see the problem for what it is: the students’ inability to take notes attentively and unwillingness to study for more than an hour even for major tests. Laziness is no impenetrable mystery, and some students just do not choose to put more than minimal (passing, they hope) effort into classwork.
Type 2. “In the middle ages, the pheasants and surfs were tied to the land.” This kind of mistake is easier to accept than most, because it is clearly a case of a student’s fitting a new and unfamiliar idea into an existing pattern. What grates here is the total lack of curiosity about whether these “pheasants” and “surfs” were the same as those he had heard of before. Also, one is disheartened by the lack of initiative shown by a student who would not raise his hand to ask, “How do you spell that?” As often as not, I have spelled the more troublesome words on the chalkboard, but this is no deterrent to a student who will not take notes. On another point, I avoid the phrase “tied to the land” with its image of a ragged worker attached to a stake on a long tether. The phrase seems to appear of its own, like the crocodiles from the mud of the Nile.
Type 3. “Stalin was a very nice man and did wonderful things for his country.” This is not another simple Type 1 error that is due to the student’s failure to pay attention or study sufficiently; it is more complex than that. True, the student certainly did not study enough for this final exam, but the state of knowledge exhibited shows more than unpreparedness. I discussed Stalin on at least five separate occasions over a period of two weeks, and at no time did I refer to him as “nice.” In fact I always include at least one truly bloodcurdling story about collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks. The student was present and taking notes every day. How, then, could he have retained any impression of Stalin as “nice”? Apparently the eyes, ears, and hands functioned independently, bypassing the brain.
One explanation for this error is that the student making it is perhaps not most productively placed in college and should seek a more beneficial way to pass the days. It puts a damper on our belief that we can explain anything about our subject, which is after all notoriously lacking in arcane jargon, to any student; but there are some students for whom some ideas will not sink in without the professor’s making so many repetitions that the majority of the students would be bored stiff.
Type 4. “Chuck Oozo wrote some famous ideas.” The philosopher in question is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and this is just one example among hundreds of an occasionally awe-inspiring provincialism. All too many students work all too hard to avoid pronouncing foreign words and names the way the foreigners intended. When asked to pronounce the word “bourgeoisie,” some male students will bristle as if their virility had been threatened; some female students cast their eyes down as if they had been asked to shout a graphic obscenity at their beloved grandmother. In general most students will simply refuse to attempt the pronunciation of foreign words.
“In the middle ages, the pheasants and surfs were tied to the land.”
Consequently, Marx’s oppressor class becomes “that ‘B’ word.” The author of The Prince is “that ‘M’ guy.” Part of the resistance seems to be a standard fear of the unknown. Another part seems to stem from a belief that anything not clearly American is unworthy of bother or is even a little, or a lot, suspect.
Type 5. An attempt to identify a portrait of Lord Byron in national Hellenic costume: “This slide shows a painting by Lord Byron of Ho Chi Minh in Middle Eastern dress.” This error caught me by surprise because it was made by a student who went on to score a “B” on the exam and in the course. When next I saw the student, I pursued the error with him. He correctly and immediately placed both figures in their proper historical contexts. “Then why did you answer the way you did?” Roll of the eyes, shrug of the shoulder, “Well, I knew it had something to do with Byron, and I had to put something down.” Unfortunately, he did not choose to apply reason or logic in determining which “something” to write. Students have confessed it over and over: it never occurred to me to think about it; I didn’t want to bother to think about it; I don’t think it’s fair for you to ask us a question we have to think about.
However much students may complain that history is “Just a bunch of names and dates,” when it comes to tests, that is exactly what many want, and they are thoroughly put out when they are asked to perform cognitive skills above the memory level. One student sat in my office for twenty minutes declaring loudly that he thought the only kind of exam that was fair was a multiple choice exam in which all the incorrect answers were obviously wrong, as in “Julius Caesar was (a) a Roman political figure; (b) a punk rock star; (c) current president of the United States.” The collapse of reasoning reached a new level last year when a student said that he did not have any of the prescribed 8½ by 11 inch paper and wondered if he could use his 11 by 8½ inch paper instead.
Type 6. “In 1715, Columbus, an Englishman, discovered the new world.” “One of the major results of the French Revolution was that the United States broke away from its mother country, France” (this example is courtesy of a colleague in the department). Although it is possible that a person could have reached the age of eighteen without having heard of Stalin (see Type 3), it is inconceivable that a native born and reared American student could reach that age without knowing about 1492, 1776 and all that. Indeed, I have little doubt but that either of these students, if stopped on the street, could accurately answer questions about the discovery of America and King George III. These errors demonstrate the trouble to which some students will go to divorce what they see and hear in class from common knowledge or common sense. They cannot believe that anything done in school relates to anything in the outside world.
Furthermore, material learned in one class may not carry over into another course and sometimes into another meeting of the same class. It has become routine for me to answer yes, the Otto von Bismarck or Elizabeth I of England that I am discussing right now is the same one I mentioned two days ago. This extreme compartmentalization of knowledge is a sign that one of the main purposes of education, the idea of expanding one’s mind, is being eroded.
Type 7. “Most of the Spartans were good Christians.” “The greatest obstacle in the development and spread of Christianity was the Roman Catholic Church.” These examples are a combination of error and ignorance, and although the examples used are both about religion, the same type of mistake occurs in statements showing attitudes about politics, race relations, the roles of men and women, social class, and other potentially controversial issues. When the two students quoted above were faced on the exam with a request for information they did not have at hand, they reverted to misinformation or prejudice brought in from the outside.
The first example shows a tendency among some religiously enthusiastic students to remove Christianity from any historical context whatsoever; instead, “Christian” becomes a synonym for “good, virtuous, devoted” (I will not comment on the accuracy of applying these terms to the ancient Spartans).
The second student was perfectly satisfied with the Christian religion during its first fifteen hundred years; it was not until we got to Luther that he realized that the Christian church was the Catholic church, and suddenly it became evil. These prejudices have proved very stubborn. They show a determined ignorance not susceptible to eradication by the presentation of facts during a few fifty-minute classes. The minds are set on arrival and conditioned not to accept contrary information on certain subjects from some teacher who becomes, by definition, a heathen, a heretic, a “secular humanist” or whatever. On a more troublesome level, a few students are proud of their ignorance and arrogant about it, making it dear that nothing anyone says to them will change their minds about anything they believed at the outset. Here, then, the purpose of education is totally defeated.
Every professor in the US could conclude this essay by pointing out his or her ten favorite reasons for why these types of errors—and many other types—seem to be occurring more frequently than they did five or ten or twenty years ago: television, drug and alcohol abuse, rock music, indifferent parents, too much partying, etc. I will concentrate on one-the disappearance of an academic attitude.
Few students are approaching college as a full-time four-year job in which doing well is a top priority in their lives. Changing admission requirements have meant that few high school students have to sit on pins and needles for weeks or months, wondering if they will get into college. Consequently, college becomes an extension of high school, not a new and special place where tougher standards are expected as a matter of course.
The academic attitude is being replaced by a vocational one, the ramifications of which are numerous. These new freshmen are the children of prosperity, unfamiliar with war or depression or the idea of deferring gratification. They measure their value as people and their success in life by the quality and quantity of their material goods. Thus, they often take part-time jobs, to the detriment of their educations, and pursue business careers to the detriment of the service professions. Many students are unable to connect a superior transcript with a better job and higher salary three or four years down the line. Some who do see the connection prefer to spend that extra hour at the party rather than at the books be cause they have convinced themselves that they can get the kind of job they want without having to “break their backs” for the A’s and B’s of which they are capable.
Other students, conditioned by past experience or given to wishful thinking, hope that professors who find themselves with a handful of poor exams will lower their standards and “curve” the grades. By “curving,” the students mean adding an arbitrary number of points to everyone’s score, thus giving the great majority good grades, or at least passing ones, regardless of the state of their knowledge and comprehension.
Another consequence of the vocational attitude is that students tend to measure the value of their courses on the basis of utility—how will knowing this get me a higher starting salary? No amount of newspaper clippings describing how the personnel managers of major companies want their employees to be able to read, write, and think will convince some students that a year and a half of required liberal arts courses is truly good for them.
I wish to reiterate in dosing that the problems described here do not afflict all students, maybe not even the majority of them. Also, once they get to the senior division, more of the students concern themselves with studying and improving the GPA. Even so, I do not foresee any immediate improvement in the situation. I expect before the next set of finals is graded that I will read once more about that famous Egyptologist and “archeologist, Rosetta Stone, who discovered hieroglyphics, demotic, and Greek in 196 BC.”
Victoria Chandler leaches at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia.