High school is not enough
High school is not enoughGene Greiner
WA#6
10/30/00
Mrs. Lawton
Other Students, Other Problems
Gerald Gaff, teacher of literature at the University of Chicago, writes books about higher education. “Other Voices, Other Rooms” is an essay from Culture Wars. The battle he describes is being fought on the college campus by faculty and staff. The majority of the wounded are the students, while the remainder are those teaching. He applies the term “cognitive dissonance” to the students who survive. Gaff states that few students are able to differentiate conflicting ideas and terms from one course, classroom, and professor to the next. By definition, Gaff’s thesis is correct; only a minority is able to mentally process, knowing that they are hearing a harsh, disagreeable combination of sounds that suggest unrelieved tension and or discord. For those few individuals that enter a university with “[…] already developed skills at summarizing and weighing arguments and synthesizing conflicting positions on their own” (152) are advantaged. They embrace clashing ideas and recognize them as rewarding experiences. However, the others are confused by the different views from class to class and conclude that course survival is contingent upon them conforming to the professor’s view for the duration of the term. George Gaff does not discount the less skilled student. In fact, his essay speaks of solutions to this “unspoken common ground” (152) found within the academic environment. This personal, multi-dimensional point of view is certainly worth “trying on to see how it feels” (152).
“No self respecting educator would deliberately design a system guaranteed to keep students dependent on the whim of the individual instructor. Yet this is precisely the effect of a curriculum composed of courses that are not in dialogue with one another” (151). The students loose. They come to universities expecting to find a community of scholars seemingly in accord with one another, but what they find is not what they expected. They find a curriculum that is not in agreement, only showing bits and pieces of the whole, which leaves students confused and possibly indifferent. This dilemma escalates when you bring teachers into the equation. “[…] [W]hen their teachers’ conflicting perspectives do not enter into a common discussion, students may not even be able to infer what is wanted. Like everyone else, teachers tend to betray their crucial assumptions as much in what they do not say, what they take to go with out saying, as in what they say explicitly” (152). Students may not even realize that their teachers disagree. A group of teachers may use one word to describe different concepts or they may use different words for the same application. Most students do not realize when this is happening to them in their courses, so these students are forced to agree with everything the professor says just “to get by.” To help people understand this “dissonance” within the universities, Gaff uses the game of baseball as an example. It would be difficult to...
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