An intellectual beggar

As an educator, I spend a lot of time reading random and often arbitrary condemnations of the contemporary student. The complaints range from a generalized "students don't care" to this piece claiming that students have no curiosity: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/21/AR2011012104554.html.

I will confess that I've said the same thing more than once. It is every educator's fear that we are creating a generation of automatons--information is poured in, regurgitated on standardized tests, and we dust off our hands proclaiming students "educated". If this prospect doesn't frighten you, you're not paying attention.

Last year, my 2nd grader turned in a project that was, to our eyes, a bit of a mess. His teacher, however, was delighted with it. Her appraisal was that it was exactly the work a kid his age should be turning in and she lamented that his was one of only two that were.

And so this leads me to wonder which of us is responsible for a non-curious generation. Is it our testing society? Parents so afraid of their children failing that they take over and do the work? The media? Or, and this is the most challenging to swallow, are our students today as curious as we were back in our day but their curiosity manifests differently?

We tsk and cluck over the amount of time our students spend online rather than listening to our lectures, certain that intellectual Armageddon has finally arrived. We accuse them of being more interested in getting As than in learning. We may be right, or we may be missing the opportunity to become social anthropologists in our own world.

I've asked my current class to discuss what "intellectual begging" means for them. In return, I'm asking what it means for us, as educators. Sure, I have more content knowledge than my class. That's an easy one. What I don't have, however, is confidence in my ability to reshape the world in a keystroke. Despite my academic background, I don't have an aesthetic based on constant communication and collaboration. But what if I did? What if we all did--would it turn out tht we're the ones who've become incurious? It's something worth considering.