Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, 20 students meet with Education Professor Testa and discuss issues sharing personal experiences, opinions, advice, laughter and tears. At four o'clock, 21 seekers of knowledge leave the room with more questions than answers.
Most of us entered the class as complete strangers to each other but have overcome many barriers and have shared personal moments. This is one of the few classes where we feel we have been challenged to take the knowledge we gain from reading books and immediately apply it to real-life situations.
When we discussed the class among ourselves, someone mentioned that the class has been a painful experience. Why? Because we look at many self-exploratory issues and learn truths about ourselves we might not have otherwise discovered. The class has the atmosphere of deep, late-night conversations had with friends, talking about personal issues and concerns and how we can deal with them in a proactive way. Most students recognize the educational value of such conversations, but we are often not aware that they can take place within the classroom, too. Many students think that learning how to "save the world" needs to be put-off until after college, after "education."
One of the more disturbing questions that has cycled through many discussions is: why are we at Dartmouth? Most of us recalled the speech given by our freshman dean at the end of our DOC trips at the Lodge. The dean talked about goals and dreams and achieving them through the Dartmouth experience. The dean suggested that we write down our aspirations and why we are at Dartmouth. He then suggested that we use Dartmouth's resources to the fullest to attain them. We now have problems answering these questions because we do not know why we are at Dartmouth. Our discussions in class have magnified our concerns about why we are here.
John Dewey discusses the issue of process versus outcome. In education, outcome seems to supersede the process to the point where outcome becomes the education's controlling end. But in actuality, your educational experience is derived from the process that you go through to the outcome. Think about it the next time you decide that you do not need to do your reading after your midterm because all you have to do is a research paper. Are you just looking at the outcome or the process or are you trying to incorporate both into your education? Is the intellectual value of reading diminished because you won't be tested on it?
"But wait," you say. "We chose to come to Dartmouth knowing what the system would be like and we live with it, or we won't get into medical school or get a good job. Grades are a big part of that." But what if we change the grading system from numbers and letters to a written evaluation? Would that change the way you prepare for class, study for your exams, write papers or interact with your peers? And what do those answers say about your current education?
Many times in our lives, we will come up against "the system," but we always have a choice. We can either subscribe to the system, leave it, or work with it in order to effect change. When our professor assigned more reading to us than we thought we could digest and absorb, we spoke to him about it and worked out a policy where we would always let him know if we thought the reading assignments were too much. It has taken a few weeks to work out a system with which we are all satisfied, but we all agreed in the end.
Dartmouth prides itself on teaching us critical thinking skills, but only within the structure we are given. Do we ever think outside the "Dartmouth bubble?" Dartmouth also prides itself in preparing its students to venture out into the world. But can we think and work outside of Dartmouth's world? Yes, we think "critically" all right, but only within the structure that is given to us
Change is not always immediate. But when your professor assigns too much reading in class tomorrow, and you really think that you could get more quality out of the assignments if the quantity were reduced, then do not keep silent. Say something. The worst thing that can happen is that your request is denied.
You might wonder what we are all doing at Dartmouth if we cannot even figure out why we are here. Perhaps by "critically thinking" about what a Dartmouth education means, we are contributing something valuable, something that gets lost beneath the dominant discourse on this campus. After all, we are all here to learn, right? We think that we as a student body would do well to think about what that means, because when true learning takes place, and we learn how to live outside of the books, the value of what we learn cannot be given a letter grade.
