We are four weeks into the semester, and things should be feeling routine. Before starting class, I quickly pull up the online quiz results. Just 23% of the students have completed the assignment, which was due the previous night. I ask if they had problems accessing the quiz. They murmur/shrug/titter “no.” One student volunteers that “keeping track of what is due on the syllabus is really hard.”
Another says that remembering each class’s assignments is “just too much.”
“Even if you have a quiz due before class every Monday?” I ask with incredulity. “And it’s the same schedule every week? And you’ve received an email and an announcement reminder?”
They murmur/shrug/titter “yes.”
“Are you remembering that you get a zero if you don’t complete the quiz?” I ask.
“Well, yeah,” says the first student, “but how do we get those points back?”
I take a deep breath. “As I went over last week and the week before, you have to take the quiz before class to get the points,” I say.
The students murmur/shrug. They do not titter.
“But that’s not fair,” one student says. “We have a lot going on, and it is hard to keep it all straight. You have to work with us.”
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If the above scenario occurred once in my teaching life, it would be a wonky tale, good for a laugh. But I encounter iterations of the same phenomenon at least weekly across all of my classes. As a college professor with a heavy teaching load, I spend hours each week interacting with students, and with each successive semester, I find myself increasingly unmoored, awash in sadness, consternation, and occasional fury after conversations, emails, and class discussions. Students seem well-intentioned, but tragically anesthetized. They skip reading entirely and are flummoxed by basic content-related questions. There is none of the friendly chatter before class, common even several years ago. Now when I enter a classroom, I encounter heavy silence, with seated students staring blankly into their devices. In emailed requests for extensions, they reference their multitudinous medications and treatments. They assume that fault lies with everyone but themselves, that their demands for accommodations and special treatment can and should be granted without regard for the impacts on everyone around them.
For many of today’s students, the notion of a shared space of learning seems beyond comprehension, even comical. And it’s no wonder, given students’ experience with individualized digital learning. Digital educational spaces – important in their own right under limited, specific circumstances – have nevertheless become a stand-in for learning as a whole. Digital learning is flexible – show up when you want, learn what you want, leave when you feel like it. It is also nothing like in-person, engaged, embodied learning. Both modalities have value, but we are gravely in error when we equate the two. Online learning and in-person learning are simply not the same thing. Encountering other bodies in a shared space is messy and mysterious…and is also the sole reliable means to develop the traits that critical thinking, public discourse, citizenship, mental health, and basic human decency depend on.
Consistent physical presence provides students with immediate sensory data about how they are communicating based on the body language of those around them. They can’t escape interpersonal cues coming from their classmates or directed critique from their professor, assuming there is an enforceable expectation that students be present in the classroom without digital dodges when concepts get difficult or social spaces become uncomfortable.
Consistent physical presence provides students with relational connections that humancentric learning depends on. The internet and digital devices excel at collecting and dispensing de-contextualized information. But education – especially in the social sciences and humanities – is about far more than information. At its best, college-level learning teaches young adults how to be human together across differences as we define problems and construct solutions, and also as we wonder at the world, cultivate curiosity, and revel in all that makes life pleasurable and fulfilling.
Consistent physical presence provides students with essential practice at deep thinking. Humanities learning that the college experience used to deliver, at least at most reputable institutions, was accretive – one concept built upon another, forming a theoretical whole. Students used ideas from the beginning of the semester to comprehend mid-semester material, and by the conclusion of a class, they could outline the relevant theory and parse specific examples as evidence of the material they had mastered. Each step in this incremental process depended on previous material – its presentation, digestion, and integration, all of which had to be practiced through reading, thinking, and discussing…with other humans in a shared space.
Consistent physical presence provides students with both support and challenge. Digital learning takes a mechanistic approach with separable bits that can be memorized and applied from individual student perspectives. For certain arenas of knowledge, like some parts of mathematics or engineering or accounting, this can be sufficient. But the entire social learning process dissolves – we say goodbye to the space where maturation, empathy, integration, and contextual understanding take place – when students are enrolled in a class together but come at the material and the learning process individually, with different schedules, showing up to a few classes here and there, turning in assignments sporadically or not at all, possibly avoiding any true dialogue about how the course material has challenged them, left them flummoxed, or even upended their view of the world. They lack the true side-by-side support of fellow students who are struggling with the same material. They also miss out on the experience of working with others who might challenge them or force them to think about things differently.
To become more human, students must learn with humans. To become socially and relationally competent, they must learn in social and relational spaces. Exposure to the exchange of ideas in person – with an agreed-upon understanding that attendance isn’t optional, for athletes and those with ADHD alike – is a prerequisite for integrated learning, connected relationships, and intellectual excitement.
The core of my concern is that students seem to be losing ground in the project of being human. College-level education is and has been just one of many routes to empathy and adulthood, but it remains a culturally significant one that establishes shared values. Based on COVID-era practices and the creep of digital options, students now understandably assume that everything can be made up, that college is just one among many things to be accomplished in a multi-tasking mode, that their decisions are theirs alone and without collective impact. The absence of an agreed-upon social contract to guide teaching and learning renders the landscape of education a Lord of the Flies race to the bottom.
As higher education marches to the drumbeat of profit, students are cast as consumers in service-model learning, which is far more about accommodation and retention than intellectual challenge. The tragedy is that in giving students what they think they want – the freedom to attend class…or not, the choice to turn assignments in…or not, the option of disengaging from difficult and controversial ideas – the educational system isn’t serving the public good or the overall health and well-being of its students.
The mostly white, middle-class student demographic that I interact with is a partial representation of the growing number of young Americans who live digitally, read shallowly (if at all), and go through their days in states of emotionally out-of-kilter dysregulation. As cohorts move through time and digital natives take center stage, their experience of being human becomes the new baseline, and what those of prior generations would see as dysfunction is now normalized. The result is that many young Americans exist in a world palpably different than mine, so different that I wonder at what “being human” even means to them.
Amidst the doomsday scenarios and legitimate climate change fears that preoccupy us all, I’ve rolled my eyes at those who predict the extinction of the human species. We’ve been remarkably successful at taking over the globe, so the thought that we would somehow vanish – all of us – seems unlikely. But what if the physical presence of humans remains, yet the practice of being human disappears?[1] Is it possible that the experience of human-ness might be altered enough that we really couldn’t say that this is the same species as even one hundred years ago?[2] Could we live right into our extinction as humans, not ceasing to exist as a reproducing species, but unable to relate to each other and to the world as humans always have?
If this new way of being human makes young people functionally incapable of connecting with others in meaningful ways, if their capacity for empathy is stunted, if they never sprint for the sheer joy of it or choose to sit in the magic gold of the fall sunshine – will they ever participate in a “dialogue with the dead” where they explore the meaning of what it once was to be human?[3] Will they understand the grand sweep of our history where the pain and loss and joy and satisfaction of shared human existence reside?
Anansi and Coyote stories originated eons ago, but I share a common human experience with the peoples that first heard those tales. Aeschylus, even across the thousands of years between us, speaks to me. I feel with the humans that first thrilled to Anansi and Coyote and Aeschylus; I can grasp their triumphs and comprehend their sadness. I want to ascribe a similar cross-time empathic ability to my students, but they are less and less up to the task of learning and functionality and connecting with prior humans. Will today’s students mature out of this? Will they get to the point of starting a social movement, or even just a hobby?
A difference of degree can eventually become a difference of kind. When faced with life’s routine problems – anything from an ill parent to the inability to get out of bed and off to class – today’s students crumble. They can’t think of options, they can’t problem solve, they can’t find a way to break challenges down into manageable tasks. In response, a great many college educators and administrators are handing out exceptions and “calling it good enough” while we watch the overall reading and analytical abilities of today’s students plummet.
There have always been alarmists squawking on about the ignorance of youth. Even in the last century doomsayers have warned of the dangers of rock music and our collective demise if women bared their shoulders. But those concerns were about human behaviors, not the act of being human in a body. The inability of many young adults to relate to other in-the-flesh humans is jarring. When an entire demographic can be characterized by its inward turn, by the conviction that theirs is a moment in human history unlike any other, our shared connections are threatened. Throughout the arc of humanity, in different eras and places and languages, it was connection with others that enabled healing. In times of crisis, reaching out to our elders and listening to our pasts always offered a way forward. Until now.
I’m not angling or even hoping for collective action. I am in a place of my own professorial struggle, searching for a generative path forward, an avenue to connect with young people productively, in contexts that I can tolerate, through dialogue that contains some shred of life-affirming content. As I work to find some semblance of stable ground in my teaching life, there is a need for recognition and transparency. If this is to be the new human reality, we should name it. Let’s not offer yet another ineffective support service or reassure young people that what they are experiencing is normal. Our youth don’t deserve the world they’ve inherited. But catering to their angsty dysfunction and making exceptions upon exceptions isn’t doing them any favors.
The honest message to young adults isn’t pleasant but it is essential:
Your world is nasty, and it isn’t your fault.
Your generation faces some big problems, and you need to get to work on them together.
The current college student cohort remains a minority in America, and their demographic is still too young to run the world. Time remains for conditions to change, for culture and behavior to shift. So, I extend a hand of welcome to these new humans, but with trepidation. At present, I do not want to be a part of the world they are creating. Theirs is not a human future I care to participate in, or even observe from a distance.
Moving forward, can we find some common ground? Can they chart a path to true satisfaction, connection, and productivity? Can they find a way to live as humans?
I will act in hopefulness and wish them well, whatever they are.
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[1] I suggest the incomparable David Naimon’s podcast Between the Covers and his conversations with poet Jorie Graham, one of the sources that prodded my exploration of this question. (https://tinhouse.com/podcast/jorie-graham-runaway/, https://tinhouse.com/podcast/jorie-graham-to-2040/)
[2] Noteworthy thinkers have been positing just such a reality for many years now. The work of bell hooks on “transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” and its inherent structure that incentivizes inhumanity is certainly worth spending time with.
[3] Farge’s exploration of the archives can be read as a missive from a distant epoch, but she claims that human dialogue across time and culture remains a core human practice. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, Yale University Press, 2013, originally published in France in 1989, p. 54.
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