I don't know about everyone else, but I have grown increasingly disillusioned with classroom learning since I came to Dartmouth. Whereas in high school I would look forward to going to class, I now have to force myself to get up in time for class ever morning. Whereas I once waxed eloquently about the importance of the liberal arts and learning for learning's sake, I now find myself pushed into an increasingly mercenary state of mind. Give me my degree and that's that. My goals for college academics have deteriorated from high ideals about improving myself and my mind to the following sentiments: just get though this term, just get through this week, just get through this class.
I don't think it is that my classes are too hard (hard yes, but not too hard), nor is it that they aren't engaging (for the most part they are). Still, for some reason I can't bring myself to fully appreciate them. I think part of the problem is that there seems to be so much more I'd rather be doing. Mark Twain's famous aphorism that we shouldn't let school get in the way of our education never really made sense to me until I came to Dartmouth. Now it definitely does.
I think a lot of my current feelings about school work now actually serve to demonstrate Dartmouth's great strength as an academic community. In high school there were few distractions from my work, but here there are so many programs, clubs and events the College makes possible that I have an extremely hard time actually focusing on the part of being a student here. So I spend my term attending events, working with clubs and hanging out with people, only to find my academic life collapsing around me in week seven or so. I usually end my terms exhausted and burnt out and wondering why I didn't put more time into my work.
In some ways, I've come to see class as the least interesting aspect of my experience here. It isn't that I've lost interest in intellectual topics a lot of what I spend my time doing is learning, talking and reading about important thinkers and thoughts. But it has gotten to the point where I see my homework and my time in class as an interruption in a more valuable and more interesting education, even though, as I said, my classes are usually objectively interesting by any reasonable standard. A lot of people I know have expressed similar feelings to me. What I am describing is likely not everybody's situation, but I think it is a common enough problem that it needs to be addressed.
So what can be done about it? Partly, I think, the professors can help us. The professors study in their fields because they have an intense passion for it. They have literally devoted their lives to their disciplines. The most effective way to get students fired up about learning is to communicate that passion to them. Some professors are already good at this; others, though they know their fields like the backs of their hands, aren't so effective. Students have a lot of amazing activities competing for their attention, and rightly or wrongly, they are looking for a reason to care more about classroom learning than everything else that goes on at Dartmouth.
I also think the professors (and I'm thinking here mainly about the humanities and social sciences) could really help students put more work into their classes if they allowed for more courses to include a self-directed component. For instance, as one of my professors did last term, they could give students a chance to write an essay on a topic or book of their choice, even if that book were not on the syllabus. That way, each student could get the chance to read something he or she really wanted to, and have it count for class credit.
Of course, the students have got to do some of the work too. We need to remind ourselves that we are here first and foremost here as students and that we should put most (if not all) of our other commitments behind that. I am not entirely sure how to do that, but I hope I figure it out soon.
