In an article quoting professor and acclaimed novelist Lawrence Naumoff, he relates his experience with students in a UNC-Chapel Hill writing class. He recounts how he asked the students if they were familiar with a specific author… no one was. In describing the man, a student interrupted to say that he had had a professor who sounded much the same, a sort of literary wild man. Naumoff asked the student the man’s name. He didn’t know. Then, he asked the student, “Do you know my name?”
After a pause, the student replied, “No.”
When he shared his experience, grieving the fact that students didn’t even go to the trouble of finding out the name of the professor teaching the course, other UNC professors opened a floodgate of dispiriting accounts of the same saying: “It’s not that they don’t know; it’s that they don’t care about what they don’t know.”
Lest we think this happens only at UNC, the late Dr. James Kilgo of UGA told me the same story of his literature classes there. The attitude of most of his students was simply to get the course out of the way. No questions. No discussion.
It is this mind-set that current educators must fight to avoid in our students. In society as a whole, ignorance and lack of curiosity are no longer sources of shame and motivation. The attitude of awe and wonder about what we do not know is waning.
J. Peder Zane, who wrote the above article, claims that this lack of curiosity, and collapse of learning, is inevitable and incurable. He maintains that the tsunami of the information age has made it such that students cannot know enough to master any discipline well. They are forced to only focus on a small area of life, knowing “more and more about less and less.” In his mind, the days of a liberal arts education, where students can enjoy learning about many exciting things, are dead and gone. He also states that world globalization and the loss of job security has assisted in creating this monster – the belief that only a man’s work and vocation really matters, rather than his heart, mind, or soul.
If this gloomy surmise holds any truth, then we should become more committed to raise up a generation of students who desire to learn and grow in knowledge. We have to fight narrow pursuits that rob our children from exposure to things that will expand their hearts, challenge their minds, and enrich their souls. I am convinced that students created in the image of God are born curious and wanting to know, and if they lose that awe and wonder, it is because they been subjected to an environment that allows “whatever” to be their response to truth, beauty, and goodness. Students can be different.
Education is about life, love and knowing. Let’s strive together to give no legitimacy to cries of boredom, but instead let’s encourage the sincere and passionate teachers not to succumb to the apathy. Plus we must guide our own children to seek the abundance and inspiration a full education can offer.
Bobby Scott, headmaster of Perimeter School in Johns Creek, Georgia, and director of the ChildLight Schools Association, has over 30 years of educational experience. He is a co-author of When Children Love to Learn (Crossway Books), a Charlotte Mason education book for school educators. Bobby has been the headmaster of Perimeter School in Johns Creek, GA (a 500+ student school of grades K-8) for 26 years. Since 2004, he has annually led teacher training teams to the Punchmi Christian Academy in Karanse, Tanzania, East Africa, as well as been an adjunct instructor at the Joshua Teacher Training College, also in Tanzania. He holds a Master of Education in Counseling and a Master of Education in School Administration. He and his wife, Valerie, have a son and two daughters.
