To place this into context, I, too, come from the public university, the inner city (NY) public university system — CUNY.My first book, Life-Affirming Acts, is about teaching composition in this environment. There are, I think, still, very different challenges, different problems that we can layer onto the ones I suggest in my post. So I see what you’re saying — I hear you.

Yes, I think that we do have a challenge that my be “truly generational,” as you say. But I’m afraid that the “challenged generation” is not the students’ — it’s the baby boomer, the Vietnam and post-Vietnam generation that has straddled the Vietnam and Watergate and Civil Rights, the information age, the AIDS crisis, 9/11 that may be the cause. Our current crop of helicopter parents are this generation. The anxiety ridden parents seeking safety for their children is this generation too.

I don’t blame the kids. So a solution, this one for the classroom, is that I teach for the heart. I don’t worry about the head so much and try really hard to engage thee whole student. But of course, you might say; this is normal. Yet I don’t see this happening in any systematic way across many campuses. I still see teachers working with the student’s head only, seeing it as an empty vessel that needs to be filled. If we recognize that students bring in all sorts of knowledge, we can tap it, show respect, and enable them them to enter more complex ideas, subtle ones, this way, and hopefully get them to feel something else, something different.

In my own work, I’ve been obsessed, for a number of year, with the K-16 continuum. So I teach, every spring, a course on “how to teach writing, how to use writing” for learning. In this course, we travel to NYC and work with students in Washington Heights, NY. Middlebury students and NYC students work together; we serve as mentors and tutors. Back in the classroom, our work in is about analyzing such things as responsibility, value, “the good life,” education, what it means, and so on. It’s quite a transformative class and students come out of it changed, literally. On my end, I work with teachers in NYC (and Newark), trying to help them address the constraints they’re under. In this project, we usually begin with a 10th grade class, and I see them through to their high school graduation. Middlebury students in my course when the NYC students are juniors-seniors, guide them through the application process.

And I teach a course on “Class and the Environment,” where we engage communities that are involved in grassroots organizing around issues pertaining to the environment. This covers urban gardening, shanty towns, vertical gardening, nutrition, health and education, and so on. So while we work on examining these issues — industrial zones where people are made to suffer for a profit, for instance — I make sure that part of the course has students out in the field working, sometimes with migrants.

What am I suggesting, then? I think that we need to work and talk together, as we’re doing here, sharing our stories about what we see, and creating spaces for solutions — can be online like this — so that we can begin to expand on our mission since, if we look around, there’s plenty of things to do. There are not shortages of jobs, I think, but there is a lack of imagination and political will about how and where to apply our energies. So the last recommendation, then, or suggestion, is to be involved politically to make sure we’re voting, on a local level, for the candidates that will support these changes or alternatives. This is important at the school board level, I think.

So thanks again! I appreciate your comments and how you push me to think!

I look forward to reading your thoughts on potential remedies to the culture of anti-intellectualism among today’s college students. Anti-intellectualism would probably be somewhat refreshing, since at least it’s taking a position. As you put it, what we face is more of a numbness — an innocent, unquestioning desire to continually feed the maw of the Smartphone-Texting-Facebook-Twitter-Call of Duty machine. For many, attending class only serves as a rude interruption to satisfying that unquenchable desire. The rather depressing end to your essay leads me to think you are not entirely convinced that we can simply teach our way out of this. So, where do we go from here?

I also agree very much about the need of story to tell. They have sex, in order to keep their self-steam. The culture of boyfriend girlfriend relationship put lots of pressure on those who don’t have any. I saw some of my American friends (girls) who said, they feel pressure even from their family side to find a boyfriend, while the girl is just 18. I am happy i never had such a pressure, not from my family side and not my culture.

I’m also happy for you, totally, because you’re finding your own way, without fear. Proof is June

Thank you for writing. I sure have a good time. The big day coming soon in june and i am super excited for that.