Just three days ago, The New York Times published an article entitled “Journal Showcases Dying Art of the Research Paper,” where correspondent Sam Dillon talks about the Concord Review and its “cantankerous” publisher, William H. Fitzhugh. This Review showcases high school history papers of extraordinary merit—papers of the length and quality that would be expected of a postgraduate or advanced undergraduate of the field.
The very existence of such a Review (and the fact that it has been silently sputtering along for over two decades) tells us a lot about the state and the philosophies of education today. I myself have never written a paper of such length or merit in my high school career—and I imagine many of my readers have not either. Instead, I was slowly honed in my high school career to write short x-paragraph essays that clearly defined a topic, added a bit of insight culled with 15 minutes of thought, and persuaded the layman effectively.
It was practical writing, above all, not with the insight of a historian per se, but with the insight of a common man locked in a room with historical documents, struggling to say something unique about them. No matter what it was called, no matter how long the list of citations was, it was not a research project. It was instead the “Powerpoint lecture” of papers, with all of its alacrity and all of its banality.
I realized that in my personal academic maturation, exposure to this type of writing, done by people who were my age, could have defined my early relationship with history as a subject. It could have moved it from the practical—What does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mean for modern society?—to the philosophical—How does the notion of Muslim fraternity define the Arab world?
The latter is of the rare breed of questions that have nonetheless plagued presidents and history scholars and have really come to define the nature of historical scholarship and modern events. And I tell you, I would have thought about these questions seriously because people my age have thought and written whole 22 page papers on them. They can think rigorously, and so can I!
This should be the thought process when any student is exposed to a field of intellectual inquiry. Many of us are college undergraduates—now in the last phase of our lives when we will be exposed to introductory classes. Such survey courses have come to define the nature of the American liberal arts curriculum. Yet—especially at places like Stanford—a survey course aims to give the wide-eyed newcomer the “lay of the land.” Such an act is a well-intentioned but naive way to introduce students to a field. It only makes the less confident cower in fear and the more confident make flash cards.
What is needed in its stead is a focus on the values of a field—coupled with it a penetrating focus on two or three specific answers or applications that have defined some contour of the field. This reframing of introductory education does two large things: it defines the thought process of a field to its newest observers, and, more importantly, it gives people something to aspire to in a field. It replaces their sense of foreign-ness in this new area with the tools to contribute and communicate, even in the smallest of ways. More classes should take a page from CS 106A in this regard and force them, even with their admittedly pathetic corpus of knowledge, to make something awesome from that corpus.
When I hear my fellow students complain about a class, it often is the case that the class fails to give them the larger picture, the context that makes all their facts useful as non-practitioners. Two decades from now, we may not remember the practical facts about a subject. But we will remember the single concept that defined the class—and the enormous pillars that were laid before us in 10 weeks time.
This is why I ask Stanford—and just about every other elite university in America—to introduce us to fields well. You are atop an ivory tower. You are not a school that prepares students for an industry, nor for a vocation. Don’t stoop to that practical lens of education when you give students an introduction to a field. We can look up the “lay of the land” ourselves with Wikipedia. We don’t need awesome professors for that. We need awesome professors to give us depth—the kind that can’t easily be found online. In this age of forgettable facts, we need something unforgettable: wisdom.
Want to give Aaditya a little bit of practical education? You can always insult him with it at [email protected].