It should come as little surprise that all my adult life I have been nagged by a fuzzy sensation that the time we live in is once again out of joint. I have consequently been attracted to a wide variety of skeptical and alarmist social theories—from Rousseau’s argument that the ostensible progress of the arts and sciences had resulted in moral corruption, through Marcuse’s critique of consumer capitalism, to conservative or communitarian laments that the Protestant ethic, respect for authority, and a degree of social cohesion have been displaced by a culture of impulsive self-indulgence. What set me on a clearer intellectual course, though, were the problems I began to notice as a college teacher over a decade ago.
When I started teaching political science at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG) in the fall of 1998, I was not the greatest teacher. I was fresh out of graduate school at the University of Notre Dame. Its still very traditional Department of Government and International Studies1 had provided me with an intellectual environment that was at once cozy and stimulating. There, I had been inspired by a few great teachers like Fred Dallmayr, Alan Dowty, and Martha Merritt—but had received zero pedagogical training. I had asked to audit a course on teaching methods, only to find out that the professor offering it taught mostly by negative example. Class materials and sessions were mildly disorganized, and she was often late for class. I had also taught my own course on nationalism, but no one from the department had given me any guidance or shown any interest in it. All this experience was hardly sufficient preparation for facing the college classroom.
The courses I taught at AUBG were initially based on a few fairly dull textbooks. In upper-level classes, I supplemented those with sometimes duller 30-page journal articles rehearsing the main theoretical debates in different areas. Naturally introverted, I did not exactly feel the classroom as my natural element. To reduce my anxiety, I stuck to carefully laid out lesson plans. I also presented detailed outlines of assigned readings analyzing, for example, World Bank policies or the roots of ethnic conflict. As a nod to the interactive teaching methods AUBG faculty were encouraged to adopt, I did direct occasional questions at students. But against much common advice, I often went on to answer these myself, and the classroom rarely erupted in heated discussion.
My initial approach to teaching thus violated all postulates of pedagogical wisdom which, ever since Dewey, had increasingly encouraged active student engagement. Yet, something almost miraculous happened. Most of the exams I graded showed solid understanding of difficult concepts, reasonable clarity of thought, and a decent command of written English. I also saw quite a few students, most of whom never received an A, sign up to take three of four courses with me. One of them, Denitsa, even came by (after I had given her yet another B+ on her take-home final essay) to tell me how much she and her friends loved my courses. She said they joked they were majoring in “Sardamov,” not in political science.
I was slightly puzzled by such professed or implicit student devotion which I could not possibly have inspired. I was even more perplexed by the ability of most of my students to demonstrate some solid learning under such suboptimal conditions and the cognitive torture to which I was subjecting them. Despite those encouraging, if surprising, results, I sensed I needed to liven up my classes a bit. I gradually replaced many unwieldy journal articles with shorter, less “theoretical,” and more digestible texts from publications like Foreign Affairs. I also introduced a larger number of sometimes longer, but much more evocative pieces like Robert Kaplan’s dark prophesies from The Atlantic.2
I also started to open each class session by asking students about current events covered in the media. I additionally integrated into my classes short news stories or opinion pieces which I handed out for students to read in class. Those would typically contain lively descriptions of momentous events like the Asian financial crisis or NATO’s bombing campaign over Serbia. Both our current-event roundups and the handouts I distributed often supplied striking details from the unending real-life drama ostensibly captured by dry theoretical debates. These were meant to provide vivid illustrations of the larger issues and more abstract concepts discussed in course readings.
This purpose was served even better, I thought, by brief segments from recent documentaries (mostly produced by the BBC) which I started to show regularly in class. For example, I would incorporate into a class dealing with nationalism and ethnic conflict interviews with Hutu villagers who had participated in the butchering of the Tutsi in Rwanda. They described with some bewilderment how they had joyfully competed among themselves as to who would hack with a machete a larger number of their next-door neighbors, including many women and children. I would then ask students to relate what they saw and heard to debates about the driving forces and motivations behind such genocidal campaigns, sometimes carried out by thousands of apparently “willing executioners.”3 Or, in International Political Economy, I would show a segment describing a cashew-processing plant built with a loan from the World Bank in Tanzania which lay idle. I would then ask students about possible explanations for this glaring failure of international economic assistance, linking these to theories of economic development.
In addition to these pedagogical enhancements, I gradually pared down the PowerPoint outlines I projected in class and adopted a rule that I would never speak uninterrupted for more than a few minutes. I experimented with brief writing exercises, small-group discussions in class, and more practical group assignments outside of class. I worked hard to make my classes a lot more engaging for students, if not uninterrupted fun. As I was doing all this, I honestly believed I was becoming a better teacher and helping my students become better learners. According to the reigning pedagogical doctrine, those methodological improvements should have delivered some handsome intellectual returns (or superior “learning outcomes”). Yet, I observed with growing alarm an opposite trend.
I first became acutely aware that things were going amiss one afternoon in October 2002. That day Lejla, an obviously bright junior from Albania who was taking my Conflict and Conflict Resolution class, came to see me during my office hours. She was clutching a copy of “The Last Negotiation,” a 4,250-word article from Foreign Affairs proposing a bold stab at a final settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.4 Before presenting their own recipe, the two authors introduced briefly two alternative approaches to resolving that seemingly intractable conflict: one advocating incremental steps that would allow the two sides to gradually build mutual trust, and another envisioning an all-out effort to hammer out a comprehensive final settlement. Lejla told me with palpable frustration that the previous night she and a few other students had spent almost two hours arguing over which approach the authors favored, if any.
I was taken aback. To me, the position of the authors seemed crystal clear. After all, the title of the article itself reflected quite transparently the overall thrust of the argument it contained. Yet here were a group of intelligent, earnest students making an honest effort to understand that fairly uncomplicated argument—and falling short.
A few days later another student from the same class, Jovana, stopped by to share a different yet related kind of frustration. She came from Serbia and was one of the stronger students in the class. Jovana had no problem understanding each of the assigned articles or book chapters. She was concerned, though, that there were too many of those, and so much content could hardly “sink in.” I tried to convince her that, by American standards, two articles or book chapters, on average 30-40 pages per class session (for a class which meets twice a week), was not an inordinate amount of reading. And once she graduated, she would need to process much larger piles of information in the field she would pick for her career. She left apparently unconvinced.
A few weeks into the following semester, in February 2003, two students in my International Political Economy class came in with different concerns. Sam, an exchange student from the United States, complained he could not really understand why we were reading most of the texts I had assigned and we were discussing in class. What purpose could all this theorizing serve? I could sense that the usual platitudes regarding the value of liberal education and critical thinking did not seem to convince him. Then Stanislav, an articulate third-year student from Bulgaria, asked why we were reading only Marxist authors. I took out the syllabus and tried to explain that he had the wrong impression: of the three texts with Marxist influences or references we had read, one author was, indeed, a quasi-Marxist; of the other two, one presented briefly some Marxist arguments against globalization, and the other was seeking to debunk such arguments. Stanislav also seemed unconvinced.
As I became more alert to the learning difficulties experienced by many of my students, I couldn’t but notice that those were slowly but surely growing. With each passing semester, larger numbers of students seemed to struggle a bit more when asked to relate recent political events or debates to some of the main points in assigned readings or to broader concepts. They also found it harder to identify and compare the theoretical perspectives of different authors.
Following a few general themes running through a course (like the changing understandings of liberty in modern political thought, or the evolution of prescriptions for economic development) was becoming an ever greater challenge. Applying or just accessing most of the knowledge students should have acquired in previous courses was turning into a similarly daunting task. Responses to exam questions grew steadily fuzzier, and fewer students seemed capable of mastering the intricacies of coherent argumentation, logical transitions, paragraph structure, and English grammar and syntax.
The eroding command of written English, including vocabulary and spelling, seemed particularly unsettling. Even some of the best students, after four years of reading thousands and writing hundreds of pages in English, would still submit papers peppered with grammatical glitches or compose sentences with confused word order—reflecting the syntactic structure of their native language. They were also frequently failing to make some finer distinctions—for example between the different meanings of “economic” and “economical,” “realist” and “realistic,” etc. Many would refer to supporters of liberal ideas as “liberalists” (without recognizing the derogatory overtones of this label), and this was hardly the only term which had not become firmly etched into their brains.
Such problems were becoming particularly evident in the essays students wrote for their graduation exams. Those often included 400-word “paragraphs” devoid of much logic or coherence.5 Research papers, including senior theses, seemed to demonstrate particular problems of organization and balance between developing a confident train of thought and bringing in appropriate references. Curiously, even some of the native speakers enrolled at AUBG as exchange students were showing some of these difficulties. A colleague once observed that some of the paragraphs they wrote looked as if they had tossed all the words they intended to use in the air—and left them where they had fallen on the page.
The Case for Cannibalism
This is the title of a brief, sarcastic article by Thedore Dalrymple, a conservative British social commentator.6 It refers to an infamous case in Germany when someone posted an ad that he was looking for a person willing to be killed and eaten; a man responded; the two met, one killed the other, and consumed part of his flesh. The subtitle of Dalrymple’s piece reads: “If everything is permissible between consenting adults, why not?” Throughout the text, he pokes fun at this liberal argument, seeking to demonstrate that it becomes absurd if taken to its logical conclusion. The last paragraph contains a telling observation: “The case is a reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy according to which individual desire is the only thing that counts in deciding what is permissible in society.” Still, when I ask students in my “Introduction to Politics” class (some of them juniors and seniors) to work in groups and try to identify the ideological position of the author, they almost unfailingly conclude that he is a liberal. This is, no doubt, partly due to their inability to catch all the irony expressed in a foreign language. But over the last few years at least 15 native speakers (mostly exchange students) have participated in this exercise, and not one of them has been able to decipher Dalrymple’s message.
Perhaps most disturbingly, at some point even discussions of current events started more often to fall flat as fewer students were regularly following the international news7—despite my frequent admonitions to do so and the inclusion of related bonus questions in mid-term exams. The first few semesters at AUBG I had skipped the introductory chapter of the international relations textbook I was using. Its main objective was to convince American undergraduates that international politics could, indeed, have a direct impact on their own lives, and was thus worth studying. At that point my students did not seem to need such a lesson.
In those days, students from Bulgaria and other Balkan countries still appeared to carry on a tradition started over a century earlier by their grandfathers. With a strong interest in international politics, they had engaged in heated discussions over the schemings of the “great powers,” informed by newspaper articles read aloud in smoky village taverns. In those distant times, it had been immediately obvious that the fate of the squabbling Balkan tribes was to be largely decided by outside forces. That fatalistic outlook had engendered keen interest in the larger world and the political gambits played out in distant capitals.
The apparent interest of most students in political issues was additionally kindled by dramatic events like the ethnic wars raging in the former Yugoslavia. After the secession of Kosovo in 1999, AUBG accepted a few dozen students from the new entity, some of whom had personally experienced the conflict. Also, Bulgaria itself had recently gone through an acute political and economic crisis, and many students had vivid recollections from those events (some had even participated in protests against the “socialist,” or reformed communist, government). Gradually, however, this kind of intense interest in politics seemed to fade. To most of my students, the larger social world was progressively becoming terra incognita much removed from their daily interests and concerns—a syndrome I knew had long become common among American students.
This is the bitter paradox I have faced as a highly committed teacher. I honestly believe my courses have become a lot more engaging and better designed. They have gradually incorporated more attractive (and still intellectually sophisticated and challenging) readings and multiple elements which should facilitate active student learning. I have developed a better understanding of my students as I have talked to many of them about their expectations and life experiences, and have read extensively about their generation’s common attitudes. Also, I have become a lot more relaxed and confident in the classroom. Yet I have seen many of my students gradually grow more disengaged from the issues and ideas I would expect to be intrinsically interesting to any socially alert person. They have also increasingly struggled to master abstract concepts and the intricacies of written English. Consequently, they have started to complain more frequently that my classes are—that most damning of student put-downs—boring.
I have been unable to reverse this trend, no matter how hard I have tried. I have observed how the ability of the majority of my students to master complex issues, ideas, and English has continued to decline—luckily, with many notable exceptions. Yet the self-confidence of many seems to have mysteriously waxed, to the point where I have difficulties convincing some that their responses lack substance, coherence, or even sufficient grammatical precision.8
With Endless Gratitude
I cannot fully convey how indebted I am to some of the truly exceptional learners I have been lucky to teach.9 I will limit myself here to three such examples. Aleksandra (from Serbia) and Klaudia (from Albania) both took my Introduction to Politics class, in the spring of 2010 and 2014 respectively. The course is designed around the ideas of a few modern political thinkers and contemporary ideologies, and the way these can be applied to contemporary political and social problems. Aleksanda and Klaudia both wrote after they had received their grades to thank me—the former saying how much she had enjoyed thinking through the questions on the final exam; the latter—that “there were few things that could beat the feeling that came from understanding seemingly inconsistent thoughts expressed by an author” (a sensation only strengthened by how much progress she had made in her ability to read through and grasp complex texts).
The most striking example, however, is provided by Yana, a healthily melancholic and very curious student from Turkmenistan who in the spring of 2014 asked me to supervise her senior thesis. At one point I commended her for the amount of relevant literature she had been able to read and successfully synthesize in writing her paper. She smiled and sighed: “Finally, I learned to read…” Still, her thesis suffered from a problem common to Russian speakers—since their native tongue has no definite and indefinite articles, they often fail to develop an intuitive sense of where these belong. Then, in September, I received a very long email from Yana (over 1,000 words). In it, she described her summer and asked for some advice related to courses she needed to take in her master’s program at the Central European University in Budapest. To my surprise, the message had almost perfect grammar (with maybe just 2-3 missing or misplaced articles). I was most pleasantly surprised. It turned out Yana had again spent the summer working in the United States (on a work-and-travel program)—but this time she had read perhaps 30 books in English, mostly great novels. She said she had been inspired to read so voraciously by her work on the senior thesis—but even if this was a post-hoc rationalization, three months of keen reading had cured her lingering grammatical handicap. When students ask me how to improve their written English, I often refer to “the power of deep reading” (and I sometimes distribute a related handout in class). But I never expected such a rapid and dramatic effect.
While observing and mulling these troubling trends, I have resisted the temptation to blame and chide students for their learning difficulties as I have linked these to broader cultural and technological trends. These more general trends can explain why the cognitive anomalies I started observing over a decade ago among my students are not unique. I have heard similar complaints from colleagues teaching in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, and a few other countries.10 Most of them have attributed their students’ patchy knowledge and shaky academic skills to the fragmented nature of the typical college curriculum.
In my case, though, that variable had remained constant (and AUBG offers a more limited variety of courses as compared to a typical American college of similar size—1,000 or so students). Yet, the ability of the majority of my students to accumulate knowledge, develop their thinking, and master written English had somehow weakened. Neither my colleagues’ theories nor the conventional pedagogical literature could help me untangle this conundrum. I therefore embarked on a quest to find a more credible solution to the educational mystery I confronted.