Managing the impressionable years of youth
by Greg Krehbiel on 15 March 2013
I have a friend who says something like “when the pupil is ready, the teacher will arrive.” And there’s a theory of education that allows kids to learn what they want to learn — without forcing them to do math this week if they’re really interested in frogs.
“Grammar school” is based on the idea that when you’re little you need to memorize a bunch of stuff, then you learn to think and use that stuff later — when you study logic and rhetoric and so on.
Also, I’ve been told that there’s a certain, relatively short window in life where most people develop their musical tastes, and they don’t change much for the next 60 years or so.
The general point about these seemingly disconnected topics is that there are probably times in your life when you’re more likely to learn certain things.
With that in mind, think about college. Is that really the right time — in terms of the development of the person — to be in that kind of an environment?
A lot of people refer to themselves in their college years as “snotty,” “arrogant,” or “naive.” It’s also clearly a time when people adopt major parts of their worldview, fall for Big Systems, etc. People pick up some dumb idea in college and, like their musical tastes, it sticks with them.
Colleges are certainly “centers of learning,” but they’re also cesspools of stupidity. They are stuffed to the gills with absurd, unrealistic worldviews, crazy opinions about how to make things better, and, in short, ideas that are so naive they could only be adopted by an intellectual.
Into that mess we throw naive, impressionable people — who are at a time in life when they’re looking for a cause or a banner to fight under.
Is that really a good idea? I seriously wonder if it would be better to have a universal draft and put all the 18 to 24 year olds in military service.
-- 2013-03-15 » Greg Krehbiel
15 March 2013 @ 11:14 am
I wouldn’t blame college per se. It’s probably the case that if you take any 18-24 year old and put him an environment where he’s learning a lot of things that are new to him and different (in kind, if not in principle) from what he learned growing up, he’s going to think he’s the first person ever to know anything. That’s probably true if it’s the full-time working world, college, the army, whatever. It’s probably just a developmental phase people go through when they’re introduced to something new and somehow “bigger” than their past experience.
But it might not be strictly age-related, either. Consider, for example, the well-known “cage stage” aspect of religious conversion or transition. This seems like it happens to the vast majority of people, regardless of the age at which they experience their epiphany, unless they’re under the direction of someone taking pains to prevent it. And it happens to people who normally are only influenced by a certain subset of their acquaintances, (usually cage-stagers are not surrounded by co-coreligionists at work, usually not within their family, and sometimes they’re even reacting against the milieu of their churches.) so it’s not created by being immersed in a culture of know-it-allism, it just seems to happen to people (of all ages) who lack the maturity to understand that the world didn’t begin the day they had their epiphany.
15 March 2013 @ 11:19 am
There’s clearly plenty of opportunity for people to be naive, snotty, arrogant, a little too eager to abandon one view and leap into another, etc., at any phase in life.
But it seems that certain age groups are particularly prone. And if that’s true, do we want those people crowded together in universities?
I’m not really blaming the college. I’m just wondering if college is simply the wrong thing for that stage of life.