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I feel like a total curmudgeon, writing about kids today, university students in particular. Oh, I've often complained along with some of my colleagues about the lack of responsibility kids seem to take for their university education. Too often they seem to want a good grade, but aren't much concerned with whether they're actually learning anything. And if they're not getting a good grade, it's because a) the course is too hard, or b) they have too many other classes that are also hard, or c) they just don't understand because they studied for 3 days before the test. Or they think you're a crappy teacher, though they don't say that to your face. There is rarely any acknowledgement of the fact that there are other possibilities including that a) they're not as smart as they think they are (which depending on who you talk to is blamed on high school teachers or parents), b) that they have no real idea of how to study other than staring at their notes, or c) they aren't spending nearly enough time actively learning the material.
And so I've spent part of my weekend thinking about responsibility and the fact that many of the students I see are very unwilling to take responsibility for their own learning and performance (you also see it reflected in their difficulty to understand the concept of a deadline, the last possible time to turn something in). And I've been wondering where this came from, this lack of ownership of their own actions or failure to act. Talking with university friends who graduated and left academia for the workplace and/or parenting duties, they are often shocked by my stories because when they were undergraduates, if a paper was late, you got zero, end of story. There were real serious consequences and amazingly people actually admitted yes, it was their fault and accepted the cost of their mistakes.
And so I often assumed, along with some of my friends and colleagues, that it was parents and pre-university teachers that encouraged this new lack of responsibility in undergraduates. That they'd never had real deadlines and consequences before. That there was no such thing as failure for them in school and that their parents thought they were perfect and brilliant and could do no wrong. And some of it may start in those places, and there may be a general culture of "it's not my fault" in the United States these days, but this is fostered at the universities as well. Many faculty don't hold firm on deadlines, students turn in work weeks late and it's accepted, the standards for what is expected from the students have dropped (even in the 10-15 years I've been teaching at university), and no one wants to fail anyone, whether the student has learned what they were supposed to or not. I used to think this was just due to the consumer model of university degrees that so many people talk about these days but I think it goes deeper.
The faculty themselves don't feel obligated to follow deadlines or accept the consequences or their actions (or lack of actions). If faculty don't respect deadlines (the ones they need to meet, for funding applications, IRB proposals, course paperwork, etc.) or accept consequences for themselves (such as accepting that you won't get what you want because you didn't request it when you needed to), it's hardly surprising that their lack of responsibility trickles down to the students. And this has a variety of consequences that largely don't make much impact on the faculty in general (other than make life harder for the few faculty who do toe the responsibility line) but it does impact the students and society at large. If there is no responsibility and accountability at university, why would the students suddenly develop it once they graduate? One of the biggest complaints from the recruiting office at a friend's firm is that they can't hire good people. They can hire smart ones, who are qualified to do the job. But they can't find ones willing to work hard and get the job done on schedule. And when those new workers are faced with consequences, they bail (it's too hard, it's not my fault, etc.) and (in a couple of cases I heard about personally) it's back to living in their parents' home. This is a very frustrating for a workplace that needs to hire hardworking well-educated staff. And it's not helpful for the former students either, who are in many ways not well equipped (despite some of their skills/knowledge) to do a job that has consequences when it's not done on the schedule required.
And I wish I knew how to solve the problem, but I don't.
