My take on “A vision of students today”

  

In a recent study Conducted by Michael Welch’s (and his students’ at KSU) they made a quick video called “a vision of students today” (YouTube) that delivers an interesting yet almost disturbing message about the direction our system of education is heading in this new information era.  The short 4:45 film starts off quoting  Marshall McLuhan with a quote befitting of today’s time and current situation stating “Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules” this seems like a statement that could slip right into any current conversation concerning how much more advanced the kids are than the system, interesting point, It was coined in 1967.

  As the short film gets started the camera pans around a large empty theater style college classroom focusing upon one scribble after another, some on the walls some on the backs of chairs saying things like “If these walls could talk” then across the room on the back of a chair the camera focuses on the words “What would they say”? Another scribble I found interesting was “students learn what they do” because that is a teaching method as old as the great teacher Socrates himself. This video poses the same question as McLuhan was asking back in 1967 “what is it like being a student today”.

    As the message begins with a full classroom of 200 students just as everything  today it moves very fast with students holding up small signs written on notebook sized paper proclaiming statements like “my average class size is 155” or “only 18% of my instructors know my name”  as you watch you start to get the real feeling that for many of these kids school is very impersonal and not a very inviting learning environment, Teaching lessons that they feel have very little relevance to them. At one point a young man holds up his laptop that says on the screen “I buy hundred dollar books that I never open” Well why would he right, I mean why would you open a paper book and go through the grueling process of reading every detail on a subject that bores you to no end when you can simply Google the parts you need now and have the information in seconds?

  So let’s go back to my favorite statement “You learn what you do” It is clear in this video that what these kids “DO” is get on line for everything from social conversation to subject matter for school . What we as educators and parents must decide is do we fight it?  Or do we integrate it into a new way of looking at education? I for one would like to see a collective learning system that challenges minds at a deeper level of concentration where teachers and children learn together on a global level  changing entire government systems as we know them ,and I think Socrates would say the same.