Behind “business,” the most popular major at my school is accounting. This is because it seems to lead to a medium-status profession directly following a degree. No student I know has a passion for accounting. It is simply a series of rules to memorize that will lead to the correct representation of a person or organization’s financial status. There is no connection between accounting and other fields of study. As a result, the students view everything else they have to study as baffling impediments to their degrees. They struggle with writing assignments that assume that they know about other areas of knowledge or share the background of the instructor.
We are turning out a generation of these students, student who do not know what they are missing or understand that there was once another way to be a student.
For about the past two years, I have done what I could to bring my students — learning-disabled, low-income, low English proficiency — back into contact with my decades-old way of doing things, the way that I “believed, taught, and confessed.” That seems to be coming to an end, with the de-funding of my institution’s “learning center.” It’s unclear what I will do next. I have been thinking about volunteering my hours there, to try to keep some of what I have done alive. I can ill afford it, but if it is a choice between being unemployed and helping students while unemployed, the logic is not so foreign.
All I can say is that without the alternative I and my colleagues had to offer, we will see a long line of unhappy, single-minded accounting majors stretching into the future like Banquo’s descendants. They will view being taught by computer as a relief.
I remember Allan Bloom dismay of MBA programs’ raising success among students, and the correlative decadence of liberal studies. Yes we are bringing up a generation of students for whom the delicate nuances of a Shakespearean sonnet, or a Lied by Schubert have simply no meaning. Or, worse, are obstacles on the path towards the final target (which is simple, concrete, without fascination and without hope). If education means bringing pupils from darkness to light, well, we seem to have decided there’s no light to search for.