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Passage 1
Problems and Weaknesses in the American Educational System
Education in America is not as effective as it should be because of a number of problems inherent within the system. Because of the way issues of political and social differences have infiltrated educational policy and decision-making, students are not being offered a sound way of dealing with diversity or understanding how to manage differences. Furthermore, in the midst of more large scale debates centering upon sociopolitical questions, there are more concrete problems that are not being dealt with such as the issue of cheating in schools and even the imbalance and potential unfairness of the grading system.
One of the problems with the American education system is that it has yet to form a consensus about the role of religion in the classroom. While this is not a statement meant to argue whether or not religion has a valid place in the public schools, it is fair to state that this is certainly an area of contention as opposing sides attempt to standardize how religion is treated, particularly in textbooks. Because of a lack of agreement, proponents on both sides use litigation and other actions to determine religion’s status in schools and this has caused textbook publishers and other educational entities to have to take a dramatic stance. For instance, some argue that the efforts to stay away from this debate “has pushed textbook publishers to excise religion altogether, even from history class.”
As a result, it seems as though these textbook publishers who are afraid to include anything of a religious nature are doing students a disservice since they are denying the legitimate reasons for many historical and social truths of history. In other words, political correctness and oversensitivity about religious issues have clouded education and caused students to have a rather skewed view of society since they are only being offered a rather whitewashed version of it. By offering young people only one narrow way of thinking because of political reasons, it limits their scope and ability to deal with such social difference later in life.
Education is not becoming more ineffective simply because of political wrangling about the role of religion in schools, but also because there is a lack of understanding about moral issues, such as plagiarism. While its another argument entirely about whether or not the two are interdependent in some ways (religion and simple morals/ethics) it is noteworthy that there is a lack of ethical stringency in schools. When it has been suggested that out of the top American students many cheated and had ambivalent views about it, it becomes clear that there is an ethical lapse in the system itself. According to one of the statistics in “Their Cheating Hearts” by William Raspberry, “80 percent had engaged in academic cheating and thought cheating was commonplace. Moreover, most saw cheating as a minor infraction”.
Another important issue that must be addressed in order to help save the deteriorating state of the American educational system is that of the grading system. Educational researchers, students, and teachers at all levels have confronted the issue of possible imbalance in the system. Even though there is an ages-old debate about the grading system, it is generally something that comes and goes yet is without a great deal of merit. In many ways, it seems as though there is a great deal of time being wasted within the educational system (on the part of educational researchers, critics, students, and even teachers) about this supposed problem. Instead of focusing on legitimate issues (such as cheating) again it seems there are useless debates that cannot be won that are taking up precious time and resources. Furthermore, just as in the case with the problems arising from religious debates in schools, the question of political correctness is in the background as thinkers wrestle with the possibility of grade inflation and what is defined by “too much concern about the students’ self-esteem”.
These more ethereal questions are being posed when the real problem lies in the fact that there is no consensus about this issue among others. This is another clear case of the educational system failing because no one can agree about important factors affecting education in America. Although it would be impossible to claim that there is one standard by which students would be judged, wasting time on this debate detracts from more important issues such as how to improve testing scores, how to make sure students are maximizing their educational experience, and whether or not the system is attempting to make better citizens out of young people.
It is clear that there are serious problems with the modern American educational system. As it stands, the solutions to the problems inherent to the American system of education are within reach if there could be common agreement about what some of the basic needs of students are instead of the less concrete concerns. Still, it is important to recognize that all the theories that have been put forth about what is wrong with schools are still important, but that they must not overshadow the commitment to making education more effective in the here and now. If culture and the rapidly changing state of society can be taken into account, new ideas about education can be useful. If, however, debates rest on stagnant arguments that cannot ever be won by either side without even slight consensus, then education will continue to suffer. (908 words)

Passage 2
College Lectures: Is Anybody Listening?
By David Daniels
College students are doodling in their notebooks or gazing off into space as their instructor lectures for fifty minutes. What is wrong with this picture? Many would say that what is wrong is the students. However, the educator and author David Daniels would say that the lecture itself is the problem. As you read this article, see if you agree with Daniels’s analysis of lectures and their place in a college education.
This article is chosen from College Writing Skills with Readings (1997).
A former teacher of mine, Robert A. Fowkes of New York University, likes to tell the story of a class he took in Old Welsh while studying in Germany during the 1930s.On the first day the professor strode up to the podium, shuffled his notes, coughed and began.”Good day, ladies and gentlemen’’. Fowkes glanced around uneasily. He was the only student in the course.
Toward the middle of the semester, Fowkes fall ill and missed a class. When he returned, the professor nodded vaguely, to Fowkes’s astonishment, began to deliver not the next lecture in the sequence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lecture to an empty hall in the absence of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible.
Today American colleges and universities (originally modeled on German ones) are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers, it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and the students are not doing a good job of learning. American businesses and industries suffer from unenterprising, uncreative executives educated not to think for themselves but to mouth outdated truisms the rest of the world has long discarded. College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation worse.
One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Professors continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the thirteenth century, when books were so scarce and expensive that few students could own them. The time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and turn to methods that really work.
To understand the inadequacy of the present system, it is enough to follow a single imaginary first-year student--let’s call her Mary--through a term of lectures on, say, introductory psychology (although any other subject would do as well). She arrives on the first day, and looks around the huge lecture hall, taken a little aback to see how large the class is. Once the hundred or more students enrolled in the course discover that the professor never takes attendance (How can he? Calling the role would take far too much time), the class shrinks to a less imposing size.
Some days Mary sits in the front row, from where she can watch the professor read from a stack of yellowed notes that seem nearly as old as he is. She is bored by the lectures, and so are most of the other students, to judge by the way they are nodding off or doodling in their notebooks. Gradually she realizes the professor is as bored as his audience. At the end of each lecture he asks, ‘Are there any questions?’ in a tone of voice that makes it plain he would much rather there weren’t. He needn’t worry--the students are as relieved as he is that the class is over.
Mary knows very well she should read an assignment before every lecture. However, as the professor gives no quizzes and asks no questions, she soon realizes she needn’t prepare. At the end of the term she catches up by skimming her notes and memorizing a list of facts and dates. After the final exam, she promptly forgets much of what she has memorized. Some of her fellow students, disappointed at the impersonality of it all, drop out of college altogether. Others, likes Mary, stick it out, grow resigned to the system and await better days when, as juniors and seniors, they will attend smaller classes and at last get the kind of personal attention real learning requires.
I admit this picture is overdrawn--most universities supplement lecture courses with discussion groups, usually led by graduate students; and some classes such as first-year English, are always relatively small. Nevertheless, far too many courses rely principally or entirely on lectures, an arrangement much loved by faculty and administrators but scarcely designed to benefit the students.
One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter becomes clear to them. Even simply pay attention is very difficult. People can listen at a rate of four hundred to six hundred words a minute, while the most impassioned professor talks at a scarcely a third of that speed. This time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have sabotaged their attention span, but their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think.
Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and then have their work evaluated by an instructor, if far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. While it’s true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker’s next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word.
Students need to question their professors and to have their ideas taken seriously. Only then will they develop the analytical skills required to think intelligently and creatively. Most students learn best by engaging in frequent and even heated debate, not by scribbling down a professor’s often unsatisfactory summary of complicated issues. They need small discussion classes that demand the common labors of teacher and students rather than classes in which one person, however learned, propounds his or her own ideas.
The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces the feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. Questions that require the speaker to clarify obscure points and comments that challenge sloppily constructed arguments are indispensable to scholarship. Without them, the liveliest mind can atrophy. Undergraduates may not be able to make telling contributions very often, but lecturing insulates a professor even from the beginner’s native question that could have triggered a fruitful line of thought.
If lectures make so little sense, why have they been allowed to continue? Administrators love them, of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than into a discussion class, and for many administrators that is almost the end of story. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture system alive and well. Lectures are easier on everyone than debates. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as students can pretend to learn by attending lectures, with no one the wiser, including the participants. Moreover, if lectures afford some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off. In a classroom where everyone contributes, students are less able to hide and professors less tempted to engage in intellectual exhibitionism.
Smaller classes in which students are required to involve themselves in discussion put an end to students’ passivity. Students become actively involved when forced to question their own ideas as well as their instructor’s. Their listening skills improve dramatically in the excitement of intellectual give-and-take with their instructors and fellow students. Such interchanges help professors do their job better because they allow them to discover who knows what-before final exams, not after. When exams are given in this type of course, they can require analysis and synthesis from the students, not empty memorization. Classes like this require energy, imagination, and commitment from professors, all of which can be exhausting. But they compel students to share responsibility for their own intellectual growth.
Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university scene both because they seem to be economically necessary and because they spring from a long tradition in a setting that values tradition for its own sake. But the lectures too frequently come at the wrong end of the students’ educational careers-during the first two years, when they most need close, even individual, instruction. If lecture classes were restricted to juniors and seniors, who are less in need of scholarly nurturing and more able to prepare work on their own, they would be far less destructive of students’ interests and enthusiasms than the present system. After all, students must learn to listen before they can listen to learn. (1310 words)


Passage 3
In Defense of the Traditional Classroom:
An Argument Against the Move to Online Classes
Posted by Nicole Smith, Dec 15, 2011
Eliminating the traditional K-12 classroom in exchange for impersonal online classes would be the biggest possible mistake for students and teachers alike. Sure, it would be nice, in theory at least, to attend class in your pajamas, but this benefit of taking online classes is far outweighed by other losses students would face with such a shift. Aside from academics, one of the most important aspects of college life is the social interaction that comes with daily meetings of other students. Considering that a large part of a student’s life revolves around this personal contact, removing this valuable part of students’ lives would be a loss that not only the students themselves would feel, but the faculty as well. Online classrooms lack the ability to be personalized and will have a negative impact on both the social and educational lives of their students.
While there are several more obvious drawbacks to the move towards online classrooms (lowered social interaction is the prime example), one often overlooked problem that would be created with such a shift would occur with teachers. Many instructors love their jobs not only because of the material they share with their students, but because many of them find it rewarding to be around young people. With the removal of the traditional classroom these teachers will lose the single biggest motivation they have to continue teaching—their students. Isn’t it easy to imagine how the fun of teaching would easily seem sucked out of a teacher’s job if they weren’t around to answer spur-of-the-moment questions and engage in the lively debate that often goes on in the college classroom setting? It is quite easy to imagine how the teachers would be less inspired—less motivated to make a difference in the lives of their students if they were removed from them and placed, quite impersonally, in front of a computer instead.
Also of importance, students will lose the motivation necessary to actually complete the work necessary since there are no teachers “there” physically to ensure the student’s success. “Motivating students can challenge instructors who have moved from traditional to online classrooms. Online student motivation can vary owing to difficulty with content, challenges with access to technology or technology itself, isolation, poor communication with instructors, English as a second language, and lack of connection between content and students’ needs” (Beffa-Negrini, 2002). The points made here are certainly worth considering since they are far-reaching and don’t just include teachers or students, but learners of different types. Aside from the lost social interaction mentioned above, this problem of motivation on both the parts of students and teachers alike would likely be an issue.
Another less potential (and less publicized) negative effect of the shift towards online classrooms would be the fact that it would be a massive experiment. There are still very few colleges in the United States that have made the drastic shift from completely traditional to completely electronic. Perhaps this is not the best time for universities to be experimenting with futures of its students. While this may be an option for the future, universities should wait until there is more evidence on the long-term impacts of an all-online course list. According to an article from the journal Education, Communication, and Information “although there has been extensive work to conceptualize and understand the social interactions and constructs entailed by online education, there has been little work that connects these concepts to subject-specific interactions and learning” (Raven, 2003). Even though the data is a little data, it still shows there is a long way to go in terms of research. Considering that universities want to build their reputations , I think the way to do that is by pioneering and fostering great academic programs, rather than trying to “blaze the trail” for new ways of conducting courses.
Certainly, the potential benefits are apparent in terms of cost. Let me offer this refutation of my proposal to avoid all online courses: “The cost of building new classrooms, dorms, or even whole new campuses is unbelievably high (tens of billions of dollars, according to one source). By implementing a distance-learning program that incorporates the state’s university and community college systems (already the world’s largest educational institution!), the state might offset a large share of those costs for the taxpayer. It might also help save money for the students themselves. Distance learning does not involve residence tuition, a big part of higher education’s cost” (Searcher, 1998). When you get right down to it, these ideas about cost cutting cannot be argued against. Going to all-online classes would certainly be the best thing to do for a financially troubled university, but then again, look at the benefits of college life the students and faculty would miss out on.
A number of scholars and researchers have argued in argumentative essays in journals on both sides, but what is important is the real world impacts such a move would have. Despite the above counter-argument about costs, I urge you to look beyond price tags and the fact that you can “go” to school in your pajamas. Instead, put those petty concerns aside and give serious consideration to all that you would be missing if you never had to attend classes. Aren’t there people you’ve met and formed friendships with as a result of the interaction of a traditional university? Don’t you think your favorite instructor is so because you’ve met them and interacted with them personally? These more “human” questions should enter this debate long before fiscal concerns ever enter into the picture. As a member of a university community, it is our job to remain just that—acommunity. (964 words)

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