Higher Education Is Stuck in the Middle Ages -- Will Universities Adapt or Die Off in Our Digital World?

By Don Tapscott, Edge. Posted June 17, 2009.

Challenging the Purpose of the University

The issue of pedagogy raises a deeper issue -- the purpose of the university. In the old model, teachers taught and students were expected to absorb vast quantities of content. Education was about absorbing content and being able to recall it on exams. You graduated and you were set for life -- just "keeping" up in your chosen field. Today when you graduate you're set for say, 15 minutes. If you took a technical course half of what you learned in the first year may be obsolete by the 4th year. What counts is your capacity to learn lifelong, to think, research, find information, analyze, synthesize, contextualize, critically evaluate it; to apply research to solving problems; to collaborate and communicate.

But now that students can obviously find the information they're looking for in an instant online in the crania of others online, this old model doesn't make any sense. It's not only what you know that really counts when you graduate; it's how you navigate in the digital world, and what you do with the information you discover. This new style of learning, I believe, will suit them.

Universities should be places to learn, not to teach.

Net Geners, immersed in digital technology, are keen to try new things, often at high speed. They want university to be fun and interesting. So they should enjoy the delight of discovering things for themselves. As Seymour Papert, one of the world's foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn put it: "The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery."

A Challenge to Teaching

John Seely Brown is director emeritus of Xerox PARC and a visiting scholar at USC. He noticed that when a child first learns how to speak, she or he is totally immersed in a social context and highly motivated to engage in learning this new, amazingly complex system of language. It got him to thinking that "once you start going to school, in some ways you start to learn much slower because you are being taught, rather than what happens if you're learning in order to do things that you yourself care about…. Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you're kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn't know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry."

Another fixture of old-style learning is the assumption that students should learn on their own. Sharing notes in an exam hall, or collaborating on some of the essays and homework assignments, was strictly forbidden. Yet the individual learning model is foreign territory for most Net Geners, who have grown up collaborating, sharing, and creating together online. Progressive educators are recognizing this. Students start internalizing what they've learned in class only once they start talking to each other, says Seely Brown: "The whole notion of passively sitting and receiving information has almost nothing to do with how you internalize information into something that makes sense to you. Learning starts as you leave the classroom, when you start discussing with people around you what was just said. It is in conversation that you start to internalize what some piece of information meant to you."

The lecture hall is a prime example of mass education. It came along with mass production, mass marketing, and the mass media. Schooling, says Howard Gardner, is a mass-production idea. "You teach the same thing to students in the same way and assess them all in the same way." Pedagogy is based on the questionable idea that optimal learning experiences can be constructed for groups of learners at the same chronological age. In this view, a curriculum is developed based on predigested information and structured for optimal transmission. If the curriculum is well structured and interesting, then large proportions of students at any given grade level will "tune in" and get engaged with the information. But too often, it doesn't work out that way.

Consider one of the smash hits on YouTube last year, a short video called "A Vision of Students Today".

Created by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, it is a stinging indictment of the education delivered by standard large-scale American university. Wesch recruited 200 student collaborators to describe their view of the education they're receiving. Their verdict: Nothing much has changed since the early nineteenth century, when the blackboard was introduced as a brilliant new way to help students visualize information. They painted a grim picture of university life -- huge classes, teachers who didn't know the students' names, students who didn't complete the assigned readings, multiple-choice exams that were a waste of intellectual capital.

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Don Tapscott is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank in Genera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

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