Author Says Objectivism At Heart Of Problems In Higher Education
How do you make students smarter faster?
Not by lecturing or letting them learn alone, said Parker Palmer, a nationally known writer and speaker on education and social change.
“Knowing is a communal act,” Palmer told an audience of more than 300 people Wednesday evening at Gonzaga University. “Therefore, the most effective teaching and learning are also communal acts.”
The problem today with higher education lies in the traditional belief in objectivism, said the 56-year-old author of “The Active Life,” “To Know As We Are Known” and other books on spirituality and education.
He told the story of a medical school he had visited several years ago, where students sat at rows of desks and listened to a professor who stood on a stage next to a skeleton. When they graduated, these students treated their patients with the same lack of humanity and compassion with which they had treated the skeleton, said Palmer.
Once the school adopted a curriculum so students learned with a mentor on a real patient, the change was significant, he said. Students not only developed a higher sense of medical ethics and better bedside manners, but their test scores also improved.
“We have now created an educational circumstance where real people care about real things. … They get smarter faster.”
Eliminating objectivism is the key, Palmer said. That isn’t easy, he said, because people suffer a “profound fear” of subjectivity.
“Objectivism is at the heart of American higher education,” he said. “(People think that) until you have distanced yourself from what you’re studying, you can’t know it well. We have objectified the world so much. … we don’t talk enough about connecting with others and the world.”
The consequences of objectivism in higher education are distance and detachment for today’s students, who already suffer from alienation, he said.
“We are a society in crisis. … Thinking is not about detaching from community, but recovering community,” he said. “This generation of students has too much distance and detachment; they have no sense of fabric in their lives.”
Palmer, who has taught for more than 25 years, spends about half of each year writing at home in Madison, Wis., and the other half teaching and speaking throughout the country.
“He was very engaging, very personal, very inspiring,” said Doug Dye, 39, of Spokane. Dye, a graduate student at Washington State University, has read several of Palmer’s books.
“Gonzaga’s School of Education wanted to bring someone of his caliber to campus,” said Dennis Conners, assistant education professor. “We knew he was somebody who had something serious to say.”