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At Nic hols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, where I teach, our faculty are part of a generation of scholars, writers, and teachers now living out the dream of tenure. And it is a dream-of job security and freedom of speech and pen. In some ways the tenured professors aging gracefully in our classrooms are the first generation in the United States to do so in the style they do. Many have both their primary homes and a second house on the coast. They enjoy social standing and good salaries. In short, many are in positions where it would be obscene to complain-and still they do.
What do we complain about? Mostly, the tenured ones complain about students who are unable to learn and how things have changed. Why are students listening more to consumer culture than their professors? Why won't they read?
There are two main reasons why there is a widening gap between the aging faculty and the contemporary students: one is biological and one is technological. As far as biology is concerned, since the American high school or common school was founded in 1890 the average age of physical maturity has dropped an average of three to four months per decade. Students who entered high school in 1860 were by and large unable to conceive or bear children. Today most students entering high school have this capability.
Leon Botstien has done a fine job researching this in his 1997 book Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture. Children entering high school are physically adult. They seek adult knowledge and, regardless how their families or schools treat them, they are biologically driven to gain that adult knowledge-primarily about sex but also about such adult concerns as violence, money, knowledge, power, and death. What is the result? The students consume knowledge from popular culture. They buy the knowledge they feel they need and aren't getting in school.
The effect of this on our lives in the colleges and universities is profound. For one thing, the students have been taught that their teachers won't tell them what they need to know. And they in turn have trained themselves to get knowledge-good, bad, and ugly-from video, television, film, music, advertisements, and the like. Coming to...