Degrees of misunderstanding

Moreover, none of these students pauses to reflect, or uses other data to check what they know about stoves and heat vents and fireplaces. Not a single one questions their assumption that climate on Earth is uniform. Not one wonders why Americans import grapes from Chile in March, or why some Australians spend Christmas at the beach.

The first and most obvious lessons to be drawn from this display of eloquent misunderstanding is that Harvard students are good at pretending to knowledge they do not possess. The second and more important is that students are not necessarily learning what they or we think they are. Just because they pass courses and get a degree does not necessarily guarantee anything except that they are good at taking examinations.

I believe that most faculties at Harvard and elsewhere are genuinely unaware of how little their students are learning. But I also suspect that at least some of them do not want to find out. They do not want to test their students’ learning in ways other than the traditional papers and written examinations for fear of what they might discover - that high grades do not necessarily signal deep understanding.

In a university community where no-one - neither the faculties nor administrators nor students - has enough time, an arrangement that makes minimal academic demands satisfies all parties. I believe this to be the fundamental problem facing the undergraduate curriculum, and that recognising how little our students are learning is the prerequisite for making changes that create an education that is actually good for something.

Choosing an appropriate content is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for getting anyone to learn anything. The sufficient condition is for it to be taught well - and I do not mean “taught well” so that students receive high marks, but that they are capable of understanding and applying what they claim to know.

Yet if we face a too frequently unacknowledged problem, the tools to remedy this situation are also at hand. These are the tools of research.

If there is one thing that the great universities of the world can do, it is engage in inquiry on a broad scale. There are sophisticated and even not-so-sophisticated procedures that would allow research universities to engage in what we might term a process of pedagogical self-examination.

At Harvard virtually no faculty pre-tests their students at the beginning of the semester; and yet without this, how can they possibly tell what the students have learned during their course. Very few experiment with different types of teaching to see which is the most effective. Even fewer try to reshape their courses to respond to deficits in student learning.

But there is a second and even more important reason to devote attention to teaching as part of a generalist undergraduate curriculum. What we are teaching is not so much about content as a process of inquiry: not French history or invertebrate biology or the poetry of William Butler Yeats, but ways of asking questions and exploring hypotheses and coming to conclusions.

These things cannot be taught in the absence of content, yet they are the skills that students will bring to an advanced degree or to careers in business and industry, much as medieval students brought skills in grammar and rhetoric and logic to the study of law, medicine, and theology.

For many students, what the university offers is a series of answers to questions they have never learned to ask, generated by a research process they have never been encouraged to understand. So if we want students to understand what we are doing, we need to introduce them to the process as well as the results of research. We need to take them into our laboratories and libraries, either directly or virtually.

The argument against showing students what is behind the scenes is that this is inefficient. Surely it makes more sense to present the conclusions of research in a succinct and orderly manner than to confuse them with blind alleys and current debates.