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The Limits of “Neuroeducation”

My skepticism regarding the promise of “neuroeducation” grew as I continued to observe in my teaching increasingly frequent cognitive incidents. Someone could say that perhaps my courses have held an attraction for weaker and apathetic students. As I already noted, however, many of the students who struggle to make sense of course readings and to refer to key points in them in exams (to say nothing of class discussions) seem earnest and fairly intelligent.

World Apart

The most telling examples of student confusion and detachment from the larger social world come from my Global Political Economy course. It is based on dozens of articles and book chapters. Each one of these is relatively brief and uncomplicated. Yet, in their totality at some point they started to overwhelm many of my students. In 2005-2006 I began to hear (and see in my teaching evaluations) increasing complaints that the amount of reading was excessive. I could myself observe that the scores of names (of authors, politicians, countries, international organizations, etc.), developments, theories, and viewpoints contained in the readings were inducing growing confusion.

The examples of such confusion from this one class are too many to list here. So I will cite just a few particularly striking ones, all coming from the spring of 2011—starting with my favorite. I included in the mid-term exam a bonus question asking students about the two terms commonly used to refer to the Chinese currency. We had discussed the controversy around the allegedly undervalued Chinese currency as part of the current-events roundups conducted at the start of each class. Its common name, yuan, had also been mentioned in at least two required course readings. Yet, out of 27 students, only five came up with the yuan. And of those five, two thought the other term for the Chinese currency was yen. Three had bothered to google the right answer after the class (which was, in fact, higher than usual).

The same open-book/notes exam also included a short-answer question requiring students to apply the logic of a counterintuitive concept, “comparative advantage,” to a hypothetical situation. They had all taken macroeconomics, which is a course prerequisite; we had discussed the concept in class citing relevant examples; and I had distributed a related handout. The handout reproduced David Ricardo’s famous two-countries/two-goods model and emphasized how his analysis was different from Adam Smith’s, focusing on “comparative” as opposed to “absolute” advantage. Still, only three students were able to draw that distinction in a hypothetical situation.

Another question was related to a reading examining the work of the World Trade Organization. One highly conscientious sophomore had looked at the wrong reading and written about the World Bank as if it were the WTO. I later found out that after her first year she had been on the President’s List, which meant she had earned a GPA above 3.80. Another very diligent student later submitted a briefing paper on an extraordinary meeting of the European Council called to discuss the unfolding crisis of the eurozone. The opening sentence referred to a “UN meeting in Brussels.” Alas, these examples could go on and on.

I should add that the problems I see in my classes are quite similar to those reflected in political science “state exams.”1 While intended to be student-friendly, the format of the exam gives me and my colleagues some general sense of the intellectual sophistication with which political science majors leave AUBG. Students need to read in advance two articles which they can bring to the exam. There, they have two hours to write an essay addressing a question related to one or both of the assigned texts. While each semester we do get to read a few outstanding essays, most are far below what we dearly hope to see. In addition to the frequent writing problems, many essays do not even demonstrate a basic ability to understand the main points made by the authors—even when they write quite clearly for a general audience.

For the exam held in May 2011, we assigned two highly readable and provocative articles—one on the rise of “the new global elite” from The Atlantic,2 and the other from Foreign Affairs describing the pitfalls of a “G-Zero world” (in which no major power, alliance, or international organization is really in charge).3 The question students needed to address was related to a statement quoted by Chrystia Freeland, the journalist who had rubbed shoulders with many members of the “new global elite” she was writing about. She conveyed the opinion of a senior manager at a US-headquartered global company who thought “that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.” Students were asked to determine whether Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini, the authors of the second article, would support this conclusion.

Many students, as they wrote, had problems drawing a distinction between the shared perspective of the “gloligarchs”4 Freeland described and her own argument. Her straightforward criticism of the alleged detachment of the global newly rich from the communities hosting them had not seemed to help. Quite a few students also seemed unable to grasp the general point made by Bremmer and Roubini—that in a world devoid of effective leadership (or “hegemony”) and enforcement, when national governments feel under pressure to address their citizens’ concerns, the trade liberalization which had made possible vastly disproportionate rewards could hardly persist. Instead, it would likely give way to tensions and protectionist outbidding. Many students seemed to assume that Bremmer and Roubini were supporting the self-interested economic policies they said governments were under pressure to adopt. They were apparently confused by the modality Bremmer and Roubini used as they concluded that in the context of the global economic slowdown policy-makers everywhere “must worry first and foremost about growth and jobs at home.”5 Recognizing that Bremmer and Roubini, arguing from a more “realist” perspective, would generally be unlikely to share the American CEO’s blasé attitude posed an even greater difficulty.

One way to interpret these problems is to see them as reflecting partly a lack of broad background knowledge and sufficiently rich associations. To illustrate the importance of such general knowledge, I always show in class a favorite one-minute video segment from YouTube. The clip comes from a press conference at which Dana Perino, President George W. Bush’s then young press secretary, shrugs off an inconvenient question. A journalist asks her whether President Putin had made a valid analogy when he compared the prospective deployment of components of the United States’ anti-ballistic missile shield in a few East European countries to the Soviet actions that provoked the Cuban missile crisis back in the early 1960s. Perino looks unfazed as she starts to recite platitudes not directly related to the question posed to her. I ask students whether they think she addressed the question effectively, and they usually laugh. I then ask them why Perino did not exactly shine as the chief White House communicator.

Students usually respond that it must come naturally to a political operative to spew meaningless banalities. Some even think this is a vital skill for any government bureaucrat or politician. Occasionally, someone would suggest that Perino was perhaps concealing some terrible secret. Very rarely does someone stumble upon the right answer—that the White House spokesperson was unable to recall what the Cuban missile crisis had been all about. And that had not been an understandable momentary blackout under the pressure of the moment, the flashing lights, and the dozens of cameras directed at her. Only after she got back home in the evening and asked her husband was she able to recall the main events of the crisis. She acknowledged as much on a subsequent NPR show, without betraying much embarrassment at her own ignorance. Like most of my students, she had lacked the urge to find the response online before she left work.

Students sometimes find it difficult to believe this story. Particularly when I tell them that Perino had received a bachelor’s degree in mass communications with a minor in political science; and had later earned a master’s in public affairs reporting. Even if the Cuban missile crisis had not been covered in any high school history class, she must have later taken some college courses making references to it. The crisis is often mentioned in articles and books as one of the main events of the Cold War, and its unfolding is also depicted in two Hollywood movies. How can someone with this background, who has taken up a political vocation, have no recollection of such a central event in recent American and world history?

The point I want to make with this striking example of high-level ignorance is not that insufficient knowledge could be an obstacle to a high-flying career. Perino obviously had one (and has flown ever higher after leaving the White House). And, as President George W. Bush famously joked, a “C” student could still become president of the United States. Rather, I want to demonstrate to students that key political events cannot be stored in long-term memory and be easily recalled if they remain disjointed bits and pieces of largely irrelevant “information” (a problem Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin had in an even more obvious way when she was interrogated back in 2008 about the “Bush doctrine” and other foreign affairs topics). Since human memory works by association, facts removed from immediate personal experiences must be related to a larger framework and an overall web of significance.

Many students seem receptive to this message. The problem, though, is that even if they have the desire to build such a frame of reference, many struggle to do so. Students are often caught in a catch 22 (though many would not know the precise meaning or origin of this phrase), or the vicious circle I mentioned above: in order to be able to relate to political events and larger issues and accumulate knowledge about them, they need to make rich associations with a larger conceptual framework and a reservoir of background knowledge; and to build this framework and acquire such background knowledge they must find political events and larger issues relevant, if not inherently interesting. This has become the hardest cognitive nut to crack, and a source of mounting student frustration or dejection.

Once in a while, a student would speak out and offer an explanation for Perino’s alleged ignorance which many others probably share but are shy to articulate: she is a typical American; and, as we all know, Americans have precious little knowledge about anything. This conviction is reinforced by many popular clips on YouTube showing mostly young Americans baffled by silly questions. To test the hypothesis that non-American students must have superior knowledge on most larger issues, I occasionally gave students an improvised, anonymous general knowledge quiz. The results from one I administered in the fall of 2009 are quite typical. As it turned out, they were roughly comparable to those of American college students.6

Terra Incognita

The quiz I asked my students to take was intended to test their general knowledge of world history and geography. I distributed it in my introductory political science course, and it was completed by 58 students divided into two sections. Less than half were able to recognize the Soviet Union as a World War II ally of the United States in a multiple-choice question, though almost a quarter came from former Soviet republics. Seventeen and 32 percent respectively could identify Israel and Iraq on a political map of the larger Middle East (with no country names on it). Only a few students got both right, with some writing “Israel” over Morocco or “Iraq” over Nepal (or other similarly far removed countries). Of course there have been some heartening exceptions. For example, in the spring of 2014, again in my introductory course, I mentioned the Indian Mutiny, and gave the wrong year for it (1859 instead of 1857). Stefani, an extremely alert first-year student from Bulgaria, corrected me—and this was one of the happiest moments in my teaching career. Unfortunately, such incidents have been quite rare.7

In addition to difficulties identifying the main ideas in course readings, building a coherent conceptual framework, and associating concrete events and developments with it, students have also become increasingly confused about major and minor requirements, course prerequisites, registration procedures, etc. The reason for this overall confusion could be that AUBG has started to admit weaker students. Still, the average SAT scores of the close to 300 students who entered the university in fall 2010 were 1185 (from the Critical Reading and Math sections of the exam). This was a bit lower than a decade earlier8 but was still a fairly respectable score, particularly for non-native speakers.

Moreover, I have observed rapid changes in the thinking and sensibilities of even the brightest students AUBG still, luckily, attracts. First and foremost, their outlook has become a lot more utilitarian. As a result, they have largely lost interest in academic careers and Ph.D. programs. Most shun even the typical two-year American master’s programs in favor of one-year, generally less demanding West European ones—which still offer the credentials they seek in order to receive a head start in whatever career they plan to pursue. Also, even the best students I see now seem a lot less animated by debates around larger ideas. Many are easily turned off by readings they deem too “theoretical,” and I am not referring to French-style intellectual obscurantism.

Most strikingly, a decade ago the majority of students writing a senior thesis took a rather sudden intellectual turn. As we have lost some of our confidence in the ability of most students to produce a major research paper, we have made this a rather elitist exercise at our department. Perhaps a tenth of the political science and European studies majors graduating each year wish and qualify to write a thesis. In the past, they would typically produce narrative texts that address broader questions like the causes of the rise of ethnic nationalism and the dissolution of Yugoslavia—and sought to draw more general conclusions. Then, in the spring of 2006, almost all picked very narrow research questions which could be tackled with various statistical techniques or other empirical tools.

This shift came quite abruptly, without direct prodding from anyone. Students apparently thought that was the only way they could give their research papers substance and validity, no matter how questionable their underlying assumptions or unrepresentative their samples. They also appeared to feel more comfortable looking at specific, fairly concrete issues largely detached from a broader social or intellectual context. Over the last 2-3 years, the fascination with statistical techniques has subsided a bit, but not the search for a narrow empirical focus.

The End of Theorizing?

Sometimes reliance on statistical validity produces really striking results. For example, in April 2011 a student defended a senior thesis exploring Bulgarian attitudes toward Turkey and Bulgaria’s Turkish minority. It was a quantitative study based on an obviously unrepresentative sample. Moreover, some of the interpretations it offered seemed driven by a clear ideological agenda (to prove the lack of strong biases and hostility). The student was one of the brightest and had one of the highest GPAs among all graduating majors. In an effort to alert her to some of the limitations of this line of research, I sent her an article by Jonah Lehrer on “the decline effect.”9 It describes the difficulty medical researchers and psychologists have had trying to “replicate” controlled experiments in order to confirm their validity. The article concludes with the following observation: “When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” The student wrote back to thank me, but she had drawn a very peculiar lesson—she realized she should not try to repeat her study and confirm its findings in graduate school, since she was unlikely to obtain the same results.

As I was ruminating about these inauspicious trends, I had one consolation. I knew I was not alone in this situation. In addition to the complaints of colleagues in different countries I mentioned earlier, I frequently recalled a 1997 article by English professor Mark Edmundson.10 In it, he lamented that most of his students could no longer relate to the tragic worldview offered by, say, Sigmund Freud, and were consequently judging his courses and teaching mostly on the basis of their entertainment value.

Among more recent musings on this issue, one book clearly stood out as a similar confirmation of my deepest anxieties. In it, another English professor, Mark Bauerlein, proclaimed the current crop of American college students “the dumbest generation.”11 That title was, no doubt, a calculated provocation and marketing ploy. It also seems a bit unfair since the kind of ignorance Bauerlein uncovers is not limited to the Millennial generation.12 But most of the statistics cited in the book, even if a bit selective, seemed shocking in their own right. At that point, I had already lost hope that the technical solutions offered by the exploding literature on “neuroeducation” could help address a problem which seemed so profound and widespread.