President's Lecture Review

“I don’t want a comfortable class. I want an anxious class. You learn better when you’re on edge.” Emory University History Professor Patrick Allitt explained his philosophy to a full house in the University Theater during the President’s Lecture Series Monday night.

Allitt’s talk, on “The Crisis of Education in America,” met with a willing audience who jotted notes throughout and asked a plethora of questions after the talk.

Allitt, who is from England, said his teaching methods are a bit stricter than the usual American student is used to. On the first Monday of class, for instance, he gives his students a vocabulary quiz. “Most walk off and get a zero,” he quipped. On the first Friday of class, he insists that students discuss their first reading assignment.

Inevitably, he says, a number of students won’t have read the work, and are duly embarrassed when questioned it. “In that one embarrassing moment,” he said, “you transform the entire atmosphere of the classroom.”

Allitt believes if you do not, you have accepted illiteracy as par for the remainder of the semester. Some of his colleagues disagree with his methods, but Allitt emphasises “these people didn’t come here to be your friends. They came here to learn something.”

Allitt had a few other suggestions as to how the American educational system could be improved.

In Britain, students begin their specialization after age 16, he said, while American students are learning a “defiantly impractical” liberal arts education. Still, he agrees “it enriches your life to be educated in things other than what you’re going to specialize in,” but American students do not learn their specialties as deeply as European or Japanese students.

Make students use a dictionary. And teach them to read and write. “There’s no discredit in not knowing a word before reading a passage,” he said, “but there certainly is if you did not look it up.”

“Student writing,” he explained, “is like listening to someone pick up a violin for the first time.”

Probably the biggest improvement could be made if American Universities eliminated multiple-choice tests, Allitt said. “The American population would take a quantum leap upwards,” if writing and critical thinking were taught, rather than multiple choice’s process of avoiding the wrong alternative when testing.

Allitt’s suggestion to students to improve their education was simple. “Write,” he said. “Keep a diary. You’ll be absolutely astonished when you read it twenty years from now. And, it will teach you to write.”

“Here’s what it comes down to in education,” he said. “You educate yourself. If you care about it, and you want to learn, you will.

The whole history of the world tells us this.”