Some Canadian political science professors are concerned about their students’ inability to write good essays due to poor knowledge and literacy and the ideological bent in academia.
Travis Smith, a political science professor at Concordia University in Montreal, said he and his colleagues began noticing a “precipitous decline” in the quality of students’ writing roughly 10 years ago.
“We figured out it was because the cohort matriculating had been educated following some substantial curriculum change growing up,” he told The Epoch Times.
Smith said during his time as an undergraduate student, professors would give a list of topics and say no more.
“Nowadays, the students expect in excruciating detail as much information as they possibly can to make sure that the essays that they write are correct and safe and complete, with no risk involved … as if writing an essay were executing a program instead of an adventure in critical thinking that [has] no prescribed conclusion.”
He believes part of the problem is that students have too often been told what to think instead of how to think.
“Education has become highly ideological,” he said.
He noted that he often gets asked, “Professor Smith, what does it mean when you say you want us to use our critical thinking skills?”
“When I explain to them that they have no stake in giving me the answer that they think I agree with, the fact I would rather they argued something that I hadn’t thought of before, or maybe even that is different from the perspective I gave in class, they’re not sure what to make of that.”
His students “rise to the challenge” when given this opportunity, Smith said, but he’s concerned about a generation of students who will not.
‘Silent Stares’
The most strident concerns came from a professor in Western Canada, who for professional reasons didn’t want to reveal his name or institution.“I’m teaching graduate students … telling them how to write essays. ... But what’s even scarier is that they tell me I’m the first person ever to do this,” Smith said.
“They’ve gone through all of high school and then entire degrees that are at publicly funded Canadian universities without any of this. ... I’m seeing institutional failure.”
“The profs are talking about experiential learning, and this and that,” and when he shared that his students know nothing about how Canada works and can’t write sentences, “there was just this silence.”
This “catastrophe” was repeated in his graduate-level political science class, he said, where “the knowledge level was really astonishingly low.”
‘Very Little Knowledge’
At the University of Vancouver Island, professor of liberal studies and political studies David Livingstone blames student ignorance on the “discovery learning” teaching approach. He says this approach, championed by John Dewey nearly 100 years ago, has been proven inferior in decades of studies but somehow keeps re-emerging as a trend in teacher education.“What it says is students learn better not by having facts crammed into their head. They learn things much better, and much deeper, if they begin to discover these things for themselves,” Livingstone explained in an interview.
He says the approach results in knowledge gaps he’s seeing in his students.
“The mechanics of writing—that you can fairly quickly fix, with a few lectures or some examples or working with them. But they do struggle to come up with interesting arguments. They don’t have very much background knowledge to pull from.”
“They said, ‘How is that possible? Like, that’s not even a third.’ I [then explained] first past the post and how elections work. They had no idea,” Livingstone said.
“The students who come have very little knowledge of history and very little knowledge of how the Canadian government system is supposed to work.”
PISA is an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) standardized assessment of reading, mathematics, and science skills conducted globally every three years for 15-year-old students.
“In 2015, the province ranked first in reading (536), second (539) after Alberta (541) in science, and second (522) after Quebec (544) in math. Three years later B.C. has fallen to fourth place in reading (519), science (517) and math (504)—a disturbing collapse,” the Fraser Institute said.
Livingstone says the drop in scores could be connected to the curriculum change.
The decline was observed not only in B.C. “Overall, though, average provincial scores declined by five points in math, six points in reading, and nine points in science,” the Fraser Institute noted.
Livingstone says “they clearly signalled that they understood the discovery learning approach had been tried but doesn’t work, that students do need content, and they need it in an organized, structured, and laddered way.”