Sorry to say, I was right
There's more evidence every day that flexible learning has been bad for students
If you’re new to this newsletter and wonder who I am and what my deal is, my website will tell you.
Two years ago, I wrote a long essay for New York Times opinion about how flexibile learning policies instituted by college instructors at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic had harmed students’ ability to learn. I argued then that it was time for instructors to be stricter about in-person attendance, assignment deadlines, and screen use during class, so that colleges could accomplish their core educational mission.
The essay generated discussion throughout higher ed and beyond. There were so many good-quality comments on the article that the Times asked me to respond to several of them in a separate article. Many people working in the trenches of higher ed thought I was right.
Not everyone, though. A few vocal people in the world of college pedagogy thought I was callous, telling vulnerable students to suck it up and deal with the many problems outside their control. Some said they felt hoodwinked by the article — that its headline, “My College Students Are Not OK,” seemed to promise an exploration of how students were struggling beneath the pandemic, bad politics, a world on fire, etc., etc., and an argument that students needed more flexibility, not less.
I think these commenters were right about students’ continued challenges, but they were wrong about what to do about them. Letting students languish in relative isolation to assemble an expensive DIY education would only make things worse for them.
And as one report after another has shown in the intervening years, I’m still right. I’m not happy about what I’m right about; I would much rather students be in good mental health and ready to learn. But given that they aren’t, it’s important to be honest about the problem and the things that will actually help solve it. And infinite flexibility is not the answer.
I’ll highlight a couple of recent stories on this topic. In one, the Times reported that chronic absences are way, way up in K-12 schools across the U.S. It seems like a cultural shift has occurred: Students and parents just don’t see in-person attendance as quite as essential to school as they did just a few years ago. This view is dangerous, because, in fact, in-person attendance is essential. If kids keep missing school, they won’t learn.
And in the Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled, sorry), Emily Isaacs, director of a university faculty-development center, argued that because students are coming to college with weaker learning skills, their professors would need to make an effort to retrain them:
That we were perhaps too flexible in the spring and fall of 2020, such that our students’ learning was compromised, can be forgiven. Those were hard times for all of us, and most of us had no precedent to draw on. But now it’s the spring of 2024, four long years later, and our students need to learn more and learn better. To do that, they need to be trained in studenting skills.
Rather than adjust curricula, due dates, absentee policies, and learning outcomes — that is, be ever more flexible — we need to adopt a role many had hoped was reserved for K-12 teachers: coaching, coaxing, and holding students responsible for developing and practicing skills and habits that will enable them to learn.
What’s even more worrisome is that, in higher ed at least, the state of students’ learning ability may be getting worse, even as the pandemic emergency fades. Here’s another recent Chronicle article:
If you looked only at the titles of the posts lately, you could be forgiven for concluding that this is the worst semester in the history of education.
I’ve seen so many faculty posts proclaiming, “I’m ready to quit,” and “I can’t take it anymore,” and “I give up.” Specifically, a lot of faculty members feel that students’ attention span and work ethic in the 2023-24 college classroom are at all-time lows, while misbehavior, misconduct, and cluelessness are at all-time highs. The many problems that were identified after in-person teaching resumed, professors say, have only gotten worse this academic year.
This evidence is anecdotal, but it suggests that students’ struggles eventually become their teachers’ struggles. Of course: Education is social. It’s interpersonal. I still think students need firmer boundaries in order to learn. But they also need stronger relationships with their teachers and peers so that everyone in the classroom has the chance to flourish.
I don’t have any new writing of my own to share right now (one reason you haven’t heard from me in a while), but I do have this essay by the great literary critic Ashley C. Barnes (my wife) to pass along: “Immortalizing Words: Henry James, Spiritualism, and the Afterlife,” in the new issue of The Hedgehog Review. It’s really good; I had read it before it was published, and yet when I read it a few weeks ago, I was surprised all over again by its beauty and insight.
The essay is paywalled for now, but if you get the Hedgehog’s newsletter, they will let you know when it’s freely available. You can also subscribe for a mere $25, half what you would pay to read some guy’s unedited ramblings on Substack. The Hedgehog Review is really one of the best magazines out there.