‘Crisis’ begins with high school system
By Dan Komaromi
After reading UCLA professor William Allen’s perspective
("’Crisis of the classroom’ pervades UCLA lectures," Oct. 24) I
must say that I am bothered by the scene he described so well. But
I am not surprised. The degradation of minds begins with the high
school system. There are several big problems here which create a
chain reaction that follows students throughout their university
education.
Namely, if you work hard in high school, I am convinced that
anyone can get straight As, or close to it. In most high school
classes you do not have to think, generalize or solve complex
problems of any sort. Instead, you simply accept what is
politically correct. High school instructors, with only a few years
of college education, tend to be opinionated and will only allow
students who entirely agree with them to excel in their course.
There is little room for mind expansion here.
While most high school students are definitely more ignorant
than their teachers, for the few bright students who have a
jump-start and have educated themselves through an extracurricular
curiosity, there is no classroom reward. The lack of such reward,
and the rigorous adherence to politically correct thinking breeds
frustration and resentment on behalf of the bright student. Thus,
there is little correlation between earning As and being wise.
The university admissions process places too much emphasis on
high school grades and overlooks other important considerations.
For example, they should ask each candidate: "What kind of books or
periodicals do you read, on your own choosing, which in no way is
connected to your school work?" It is my experience that those who
are not curious are those who never develop a method for thinking
about problems in such a way that the process is uncontaminated by
popular opinion and emotion. Acceptance of someone else’s thought
process is not the same as thinking.
Students at UCLA appear to have these things in common: they
work hard, they know how to play the examination game and they tend
to be selfish. And you can’t blame them too much, because the
system itself fails to recognize that these are the kinds of
qualities you must have, in the least, to earn fine grades. It’s
like putting a rat in a maze with cheese at the end and hoping that
it will stop to examine the texture and construction of the
maze.
These problems are created because of the common person’s desire
to idealize an institution. When the institution is first
constructed, its limitations and quirks are brought to mind. But
after many years, people forget about the history of its
conception, and instead adopt the institution as a permanent,
unchangeable fixture, which must be close to perfect, simply
because it has been around for so long.
Many advances have been made in technology and in the
understanding of the human will, yet the educational system has
resisted change, has been kept bureaucratic and lacking of any
complex interface that is so important for the smooth functioning
of any device. For example, realize that your automobile’s modern
engine is a thousand-fold times more complex that the engines that
existed in the early development of cars. So we can say that UCLA
is one of the nation’s top steam engines.
Komaromi is a senior in neuroscience.