I've always believed that there are three types of learning.
Passive learning is the easiest to understand and to undertake. Sitting in a lecture hall, reading slides and taking notes is clearly the most sedentary type (in both mind and body). It requires engagement you came to class, after all, and you better understand what's being said from the podium. But ultimately, students in this position are little more than dartboards for information. Throw enough at them and eventually something will stick.
Active learning is better, if more difficult. It requires students to take ownership of their education by synthesizing information on their own. Each paper you wrote, presentation you gave, experiment you conducted or book you analyzed involved putting energy into your own education. As anyone who has baked from scratch can tell you, the rewards from that extra effort can be huge. Forming your own beliefs, with knowledge you personally gathered and examined, tastes much better than the stuff you re-heat from a box.
Yet the third type of learning is more enlightening than even the most hands-on approach. You could call it collaborative learning in the sense that it involves a group of people working together, but that would be incorrect. It's about opposition, not cooperation.
What I'm talking about is an exchange of ideas, a discourse, a debate. Not a formal setup with a timed argument and rebuttal, or a pointless volley of insults and uninformed judgments, but just an honest back-and-forth dialogue.
To me, this kind of free-flowing discussion has always been the most fruitful mode of learning. Passive learning is necessary to convey basic information to big groups, and active learning can be rewarding on its own. Neither one, however, forces you to both understand and explain your own ideas, while simultaneously being exposed to alternate views. This type of exercise can be productive for almost any topic: religion, sports, literature, science, morality. When people are willing to let their beliefs clash in a civilized manner, the possibilities for growth are endless.
The ideal college campus would constantly foster that open interchange. At Dartmouth, our small class sizes already lend themselves to discussion-based courses. But other factors sometimes get in the way.
Some students are more afraid of discussion classes than the Hanover Police sting operations. They'd rather not waste their time sitting around a table listening to their peers if they can get information directly from the professor or search for it in the library or a research lab. Avoidance of something that can be so positive is a terrible choice, but I can't completely blame them.
Small, discussion-oriented classes are often problematic. In many cases an unhealthy balance exists between the people who refuse to speak and those who over share, who use the floor to show off how much they know. Few professors can simultaneously encourage and check the discussion. Truly open classroom dialogue is rare.
Furthermore, many people just aren't ready to sit down and have a well-mannered and receptive exchange. Too often we present our opinions as fact, and view those who disagree with us as idiots. That's true on this campus and it's true on a national level as well.
But the broader takeaway is that as we begin Dartmouth's 242nd year, we don't need to reinvent higher education with more sparkling buildings and newer, more expensive equipment. Those enhancements are positive, but sometimes the best way to improve is to put the emphasis back on discussions and debate. That might require more small classes, better professor preparation, students reaching out to one another and established places where as College President Jim Yong Kim put it "ideas can go to have sex."
We can be known as a fabulous research institution or home of the liberal arts. We can be famous for our outdoorsy sensibilities or our alumni's success. Our professors are top notch, our students are first rate and our athletic teams are showing bright signs of growth. But, more than any of that, I'd rather Dartmouth be known simply as the number one place for learning through an open exchange of ideas.
As always though, I'm open for debate.
