When I was a young faculty member – full of energy and setting out to conquer the world, I swore I would never be one of those “old farts” complaining about changing education, and how students had changed, how much less students knew now than when they started teaching, and – to my vain, youthful ears – a litany of other tired complaints.
But then, change is the name of the game, isn’t it?
Now I’m a retired faculty member, well past my prime, and looking back at a career that seems like a 30 minute movie. I don’t think I ever developed the perceived attitude I questioned back then, but I recognize I may have been a little naïve. And I recognize my predecessors may have been saying more than I thought.
Of course, students change –then and now. Times change. Today’s students are “millennials” (or even children of millennials!) – a far cry from Baby Boomers, or “Gen X or Y”ers that are their parents and grandparents. And all of us have weathered lots of changes, as has the world.
Nothing new here – we all know this, at least intellectually. As the pundits say, the only constant is change. And, to use an extreme example, we can’t use one-room schoolhouse techniques on children who barely even know of “Little House on the Prairie” lives. We know this intellectually as well, but the faster things change, the more complicated education gets.
In education, this constant-change reality creates constant (and changing!) challenges. And opportunities, of course. But dealing effectively with changes in education can be as difficult as boxing a cloud. Changes and trends around us can be hard enough to identify as they occur, let alone to (try to) keep up with. It’s a constant feeling of being behind, in a system that doesn’t allow quick changes.
But to be effective in the long run, education must do even more: it must prepare students for the unseen (and even unforeseen) changes down the road. We used to have a professor that said “Our job is to prepare you for jobs that don’t exist yet.”
It’s a tall order. No matter how good the system, we are always trying to prepare students for the future, in classrooms of the present, with tools and perspectives that are frequently stuck in the past.
So there’s one other thing to note. Not only does education have to keep up with –and prepare for – the changing nature of the world, it has to keep re-defining and re-inventing itself, almost on the fly, to do that! It’s the nature of the game, and it’s very complicated.
So, as I look back on my predecessors’ complaints, I’m not sure they were so terribly bothered by the changing nature of students and the world, after all. And I’m not even sure the frustration was with the students. I think I was too young to recognize and articulate this, but I think there’s a good chance that they were expressing a vague lament that the educational system hadn’t kept up with the changing world, and their students had suffered for it.
Or maybe not. Maybe they were just old curmudgeons. 🙂 But, looking back now, I like to think they knew better. I prefer to think they knew – as I didn’t quite know yet – that keeping education abreast of the rapidly changing times is never ever easy. But, forewarned is forearmed, as they say. If we all work together, we can keep ‘keeping up’. We have to – our future depends on it.
