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eBook details

• Title: Editor's Introduction.
• Author : Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council
• Release Date : January 22, 2005
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 176 KB

Description

Most of the essays in this issue of JNCHC address the question "What are honors students like today?" As a topic of casual conversation in the halls of academe or of conference hotels, this question is both inevitable and annoying. All of us have bandied about generalizations and stereotypes about the current generation of students, either with glowing praise when we are touting our honors programs or with sarcasm, arrogance, and superiority when our students don't quite live up to those high ideals. One minute we might complain that our students care only about grades and resume entries (forgetting about all the energy we have committed to updating our own vitae), and the next minute we praise their academic success and commitment to public service. These conversations often smack of defensiveness, nostalgia, and worries about our ability to teach this generation of students effectively. While such conversations are useful, they are also self-indulgent and predictable. If our students were privy to the negative conversations, they would not think well of us just as they tend to be uncomfortable with our lavish and unqualified praise when we are in our public relations mode. Occasionally, though, someone addresses the question of what students are like today in a way that focuses serious intellectual attention on the answer and that transforms our understanding of the people who are the center of our daily lives and the raison d'etre of our careers. In an essay entitled "The Organization Kid" (Atlantic Monthly, April 2001), for instance, David Brooks provided a perspective on students at Princeton that pulled together much of what I had sensed about my honors students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham but had not quite articulated or understood. He suggested that the parental and cultural influences on faculty members were distinct from the influences on current students in ways that produced not just a generation gap but a culture gap. He argued that most teachers (at least those old enough to be senior and tenured) grew up playing in the street, making up their own games, and enjoying large amounts of unsupervised time; on arrival at college, they extended this upbringing in independent (if not rebellious) attitudes toward authority, a belief that they could change the world or make their own, and long, languorous conversations about the meaning of life at a local cafe or student union. Today's students--at least the kind that attend Princeton and many of our honors programs--have had structured lives since pre-kindergarten, their days filled from dusk till dawn with, in addition to school, soccer practice, violin lessons, community service projects, and field trips. Playing in the streets is too dangerous or, given the shapes of our communities now, simply impossible; all activities are supervised to ensure their safety and educational value; and adults take charge of play whether at school or at home. On entering college, then, these students schedule appointments for pre-dawn breakfasts with their best friends, devote a specified number of hours per week to community service, and organize their lives to make them productive in a way that does not promote rebellion nor indulge long, languorous conversations about the meaning of life. Brooks concludes by saying that these students are not what their teachers were or are but instead are everything that the culture and their parents want them to be, and one can't help admiring them.

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