Lectures and learning mutually exclusive

Last Thursday in class, I came to a conclusion that I thought I would tell you all about. My… Last Thursday in class, I came to a conclusion that I thought I would tell you all about. My conclusion is that we need to officially ban all lectures and enforce our ban under penalty of death. It is a shame that it has come to this, but the situation is getting bad.

Every day, students on this campus and campuses all over our country sit in quiet desperation while they listen to old stuffed shirts drone on and on about the mating habits of various sub-tropical indigenous folk in sub-equatorial central America. I am an anthropology major, and even I don’t care about this material when the professor is just up there blah-blah-blah-ing.

My trouble started at the beginning of this semester. I decided to take a promising-looking class; it’s called Religion and Culture. I am interested in religion, and I am interested in culture. So by the transitive property of geometry, I would be very interested in the combination of the two. I show up to class, and in addition to an unprofessional and condescending professor, I get 2.5 hours of the most boring lecture, the likes of which are unrivaled in these modern times.

It occurred to me, as I lay slumped in my seat, feeling that someone was holding an ether-soaked rag under my nostrils, that I have never really learned anything important as a result of a lecture.

I mean, sure, I will learn a fact or two here and there, and I will take notes to study from. But discussions are the only times I leave class feeling like I really learned something.

This semester, for example, I am in a critical reading class, and I never thought I would find myself caring about poetry, let alone arguing with classmates about whether the poem represents desire for sex or merely a strong affinity for plums. Yet, I do care.

This stands in stark contrast to lectures. Even interesting classes with interesting professors manage to put me down like little else can. The reason for this, of course, is a complete lack of engagement. And the human voice, when monotone, is a natural sleep aid. This is the reason that parents sing softly to babies whom they are trying to put to sleep. This is also the reason that, when I am having difficulty passing out, I put on C-SPAN, or “The Real World”or something else that is boring.

This is probably why the United States ranks, according to an Oct. 4th article in the Daily Trojan, 18th out of 24 countries in overall educational efficiency. While we are sitting cooped up in class like suckers here in America, students in the Netherlands are out in fields, blazing and discussing. And they are better for it.

The ancient Greeks of old are another good example. Socrates invented the Socratic method – from what I understand, an early predecessor to the Heimlich maneuver. The Socratic method was a belief that students should question everything that they learn, and, indeed, never stop questioning and discussing. Look where it got them – 3000 years later, we still consider the ancient Greeks to be among the smartest and most philosophical peoples of all times. They also had a lot of crazy sex orgies. Coincidence? I’ll leave that to you to decide.

The point is, people learn so much more as a result of being involved in an activity rather than just being told something.

And yet, very few teachers in this country realize that. Students are taught math and science courses by being expected to read a textbook and memorize huge quantities of information.

Rather than learning trends and systems and methods, students in this country end up just learning scattered bits of information. Rather than being able to learn to think, they simply memorize facts. This is a case of the cart coming before the squirrel; it is needlessly difficult and horribly inefficient.

Hopefully, young professors and future teachers, some of whom might be reading this column as we speak, will see what I see: lectures help further our education very little.

Perhaps it boils down to professors not trusting their students enough to believe that they can intelligently discuss course material. But we have to do something, because as it stands now, the United Kingdom is beating us in the education race. I’ll eat my hat the day that one of those cocky, tea-sipping, biscuit-munching Brits can outdo good old U.S. ingenuity.

Dirty Bird, Ghetto Eagle or Foul Fowl? E-mail Sam Morey at smorey88@hotmail.com.