AWM Book Review

Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America

Peter Sacks, Open Court, Chicago, 1996. xiv+208. ISBN 0-8126-9314-0 (paper).

From: AWM Newsletter, May/June 1997.

Reviewed by: Marge Murray, Book Review Editor, Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0123; email: murray@calvin.math.vt.edu.

'Peter Sacks' is the pseudonym of a successful big-city newspaper reporter (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) who, for admirable personal reasons, decided to seek a job teaching journalism at the college level in the early 1990s. Generation X Goes to College is his report on what he found when he embarked on a teaching career at 'The College', a public undergraduate institution somewhere in America. He has gone to some effort to conceal his own identity and that of the institution where he taught because he does not wish "to focus criticism on specific individual, group, or institution" (vii).

Sacks describes his transition from newspaper professional to teacher of freshman/sophomore writing and journalism courses as an experience of "culture shock": students' attitudes and expectations had changed radically in the years since he was a university student, and he was ill-prepared for the change. This book is certain to be an eye-opener to parents and educational policymakers who, like Sacks, remember college as a place of hard work, high standards, and tangible rewards. For those of us who have been teaching at the post-secondary level for ten years or more, the story of Sacks' awakening may seem uncannily familiar.

When Sacks first decided to change careers, he knew enough to anticipate the obvious differences between his journalistic and professorial work roles. As a reporter, he had been able to work in a solitary fashion, consulting sources by phone and generally avoiding face-to-face confrontation. As a teacher, he had to summon the psychic energy for intensive interaction with students. In the transition from practitioner to teacher, he had to give serious consideration to the process of becoming a journalist, and to devise ways of facilitating that process in his students. He approached his job as teacher, as many of us do, as a challenge: interesting and even confounding, but eminently worthwhile.

Sacks founded his philosophy of teaching on the idealistic belief that his job was to teach his students to write and to prepare them for future careers in journalism. He upheld the same high standards that he'd been required to meet as a professional.

The students' response was mixed, but for the most part negative, and it came as a shock and a horrible disappointment. Predictably, the clash between Sacks' expectations and the students' reality was reflected in poor teaching evaluations. These evaluations --- crucial to continued employment at The College and at many other colleges as well --- made it clear by the end of Sacks' first year that he was failing and at risk of being fired.

In the interest of saving his job, he made a deliberate decision to cater to the prevailing attitudes of the students --- lowering standards, lowering expectations, making an effort to be entertaining --- in what he refers to as "The Sandbox Experiment". He offers a detailed account of his experiment, and of how he evolved as a teacher --- a story that is fascinating and frightening by turns. Sacks believes it was this very experiment that won him tenure, and he is probably right.

Sacks offers fairly compelling evidence, from his own experience and that of his colleagues, that the generation of students that has entered college since 1988 is truly distinguished from earlier generations by the pervasiveness of several distressing attitudes and beliefs, including:

* a sense of themselves as consumers, purchasing 'education' and 'grades' as a commodity;
* the belief that teachers should be entertaining;

* the belief that hard work outside of the classroom should not be necessary;

* pervasive distrust of all kinds of authority;

* disrespect and sometimes contempt for the professional accomplishments of their teachers;

* an inability to make clear distinctions between what is communicated by popular culture and the evidence of history and science.

Shocked, dismayed, and appalled by these student attitudes, Sacks is nevertheless quick to distance himself from cultural conservatism:

[Y]ou probably think I was some kind of old-fashioned, highly conservative fuddy-duddy. That certainly wasn't how I saw myself. First, I wasn't old. In my late thirties, I was actually quite young compared to most of the teachers at my college. I had a lifestyle closer to that of my students than most teachers and other professionals who had children and mortgages to worry about....My politics? I'm a liberal.... As a reporter, I was always plugging for underdog wherever I could. I had always distrusted authority and hated the abuse of power.... (p. 17)

What distinguishes Sacks from numerous conservative critics who have decried the sorry state of higher education in recent years is his genuine empathy for the students. He strives to understand how his students have been shaped by the culture in which they grew up, rather than merely blaming them for their attitudes and behaviors. He writes:

My encounters with college students of the nineties made me want to find out more precisely what they thought about.... I came to conclude that many of my students were torn about these matters of responsibility, expectations, grades, and so on, reflecting the confusion of a changing culture. On the one hand, they knew that their generation was profoundly ill at ease with the rules of the game they'd been taught, because...they'd seen that following the rules guaranteed nothing in the America they grew up in. And yet following those rules remained the only way they still knew to the 'good life' as the dominant society had defined it. (pp. 54,59)

Sacks offers 'postmodernism' as the underlying cultural phenomenon which explains the sometimes frightening student attitudes he encountered. Scholars of history and culture tend to date the beginnings of the postmodern trend back to the early 1970s. Sacks devotes a chapter to explaining postmodernism, with an appreciation of its virtues as well as its dangers. As a cultural phenomenon, postmodernism calls into question "modernity's belief in reason, science, and progress" (p.120). In its extreme form, postmodernism moves beyond healthy skepticism and disciplined criticism into the legitimization of irrationality and relativism.

The postmodern milieu is hardly an optimal one in which to purvey the traditional values of higher education! But in Sacks' view, colleges and universities have no choice but to persevere. Rather than simply decrying the sorry state of affairs, the 'decline' of society and its institutions, Sacks takes the pragmatic and somewhat optimistic view that higher education can, to some degree, adapt to postmodern reality. In his later chapters, Sacks suggests several strategies of compromise, whereby colleges and universities may acknowledge the cultural shift while at the same time holding firm to academic standards.

He recommends that educators "adopt postmodern guises" through the appropriate use of technology. Sacks asserts that until now computer technologies have been used mainly as a means of 'delivering' instruction, so that students are not really engaged with technology but continue to be passive consumers of it (as with television). Sacks suggests that the students should be encouraged to take command of the available technology, using it to create work which can be disseminated widely rather than simply submitted to a teacher. The World Wide Web seems an ideal medium for this purpose. Sacks writes:

While publishing a piece on the Web says nothing about the quality of the work, doing so is a brave, postmodernist act, suggesting that the student's work has some connection to the outside world and a meaning beyond the abstractions of the classroom. And, unfortunately, most students --- unless they plan to be writers --- don't see the ability to write a term paper as something they'll ever use in the real world. But in the age of the amusement and the spectacular, they do see the ability to create a multimedia project as somehow useful. To educators, I say, go with it, and in time there will be clear standards by which to judge good multimedia from bad multimedia. (p.178)

It is interesting to reflect upon the extent to which the technological aspects of curriculum reform in calculus are our own discipline's way of "adopting postmodern guises" to the teaching and learning of mathematics. Students who might not otherwise be persuaded of the importance of mathematical writing might be induced to improvement if they knew that their work would have worldwide distribution through the Web. Some of Sacks' suggestions are clearly transferable to mathematics education and a bit of informed web browsing should make clear that they have already been put into practice.

Generation X Goes to College will be enlightening to parents sending their children to college for the first time, and others who have been long away from the academic environment. It will make entertaining and perhaps cathartic reading for college faculty who have encountered just a bit too much of the postmodern attitude in their classrooms. It will make informative reading for education policymakers who wish to understand better what's going on with at least a substantial minority of today's college students. Most importantly, it should make all of us think a little bit differently about the effect of the larger culture on the learning process.