How to Teach and Manage 'Generation Net'

[dhilipkumar]

A few years ago, I delivered a speech designed to provoke my audience, a distinguished group of university presidents. The prevailing model of education, I said, made no sense for young people today. This model revolves around the sage on the stage, the teacher who delivers a one-size-fits-all, one-way lecture. This model, designed in the Industrial Age, might have been a good way to condition young people for a mass-production economy, but it makes sense neither for young people who have grown up digital nor for the demands of this digital age.

Later, sitting down with the distinguished educators, I asked why it was taking them so long to change. "The problem is funds," one president said. "We just don't have the money to reinvent the model of pedagogy." Models of learning that go back decades are hard to change, another said. "I think the problem is the faculty," still another educator said. "Their average age is 57, and they're teaching in a 'post-Gutenberg' mode."

A very thoughtful man named Jeffery Bannister, who at the time was president of Butler College, was seated next to me. "Post-Gutenberg?" he said. "I don't think so. At least not at Butler. Our model of learning is pre-Gutenberg. We've got a bunch of professors reading from handwritten notes, writing on blackboards, and the students are writing down what they say. This is a pre-Gutenberg model—the printing press is not even an important part of the learning paradigm." He added, "Wait till these students who are 14 and have grown up learning on the Net hit the [college] classrooms—sparks are going to fly."

Bannister, a wise man who, sadly, has since passed away, was absolutely right, and he was able to make some progress at Butler after our encounter.

SCANNING TEXTS, SKIPPING LECTURES
The old model of pedagogy—teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all—makes no sense to young people who have grown up in a digital world. Members of the Net Generation, as I call those who turn 11 to 31 this year, have different mental habits than their Boomer parents have. They expect a conversation, rather than a lecture, and they're used to working in groups, rather than toiling alone. Digital immersion has even affected the way they absorb information. They don't necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest.

In universities across the country, the smartest students often don't go to lectures. One Stanford student said to me recently: "The thing around here is to get an A without ever attending a lecture."

This shakes up such old style professors as Mark Bauerlein, who wrote the book, The Dumbest Generation, arguing that "the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes out future." Educators like Beuerlein are uneasy with the change in power reflected in how information is dispensed and knowledge is obtained. Sadly, these old-style educators—locked into models that go back centuries—end up heaping abuse on the students who are revolutionizing the model of pedagogy.

INDUSTRIAL AGE MODEL: ISOLATION
Net Geners clearly need a different model. The education system should revolve around the student, rather than the teacher. And teachers, instead of lecturing, should interact with students and help them discover lessons for themselves. Schools should customize education to fit each child's individual way of learning, and they should let students collaborate, instead of isolating them in an out-of-date model.