The Teaching Problem

The reason most teaching is bad is that most teaching follows a demonstrably bad model. By John Tagg

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

A full audio version of this article can be found below the paywall.

Higher education is much in the news, but the central challenge that colleges and universities are failing to meet is receiving hardly any attention. The big stories have been student loans, protests and demonstrations, affirmative action, ratings and rankings, racial and ethnic equity, funding and costs. Most recently, higher-ed news has been hijacked by the Trump administration’s incoherent and destructive attack on universities and foreign students. This is serious, and we can only hope that it doesn’t last long. But it is also a distraction from the most important long-term challenge facing higher education.

The main weakness of most colleges and universities is that they don’t do a very good job of educating most students. Most teachers do a mediocre job of teaching, and so most of their students do a mediocre job of learning. Many of these teachers are smart and talented, spend most of their time on teaching, and want to teach well, but because of the design of their institutions and the incentives built into their work, most fail. Most teaching follows a demonstrably bad model: the teacher tells the students what he wants them to know and then tests their ability to recall the information he has provided. This is one of the worst possible ways to get anyone to learn anything. Students don’t learn much even from excellent lecturers and remember very little from being told something once.