College students are doodling in their notebooks or gazing off into space as their instructor lectures for fifty minutes. What is wrong with this picture? Many would say that what is wrong is the students. However, the educator and author David Daniels would say that the lecture itself is the problem. As you read this article, see if you agree with Daniels’s analysis of lectures and their place in a college education.

A former teacher of mine, Robert A. Fowkes of New York University, likes to tell the story of a class he took in Old Welsh while studying in Germany during the 1930s. On the first day the professor strode up to the podium, shuffled his notes, coughed, and began, “ Guten Tag, Meinen Damen und Herren ” (“Good day, ladies and gentlemen”). Fowkes glanced around uneasily. He was the only student in the course. Toward the middle of the semester, Fowkes fell ill and missed a class. When he returned, the professor nodded vaguely and, to Fowkes’s astonishment, began to deliver not the next lecture in the sequence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lectured to an empty hall in the absence of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible. Today, American colleges and universities (originally modeled on German ones) are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers, it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and students are not doing a good job of learning. American businesses and industries suffer from unenterprising, uncreative executives educated not to think for themselves but to mouth outdated truisms 1 the rest of the world has long discarded. College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation worse. One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Professors continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the thirteenth century, when books were so scarce and expensive that few students

could own them. The time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and turn to methods that really work. To understand the inadequacy of the present system, it is enough to follow a single imaginary first-year student—let’s call her Mary—through a term of lectures on, say, introductory psychology (although any other subject would do as well). She arrives on the first day and looks around the huge lecture hall, taken a little aback to see how large the class is. Once the hundred or more students enrolled in the course discover that the professor never takes attendance (how can he?—calling the role would take far too much time), the class shrinks to a less imposing size. Some days Mary sits in the front row, from where she can watch the professor read from a stack of yellowed notes that seem nearly as old as he is. She is bored by the lectures, and so are most of the other students, to judge by the way they are nodding off or doodling in their notebooks. Gradually she realizes the professor is as bored as his audience. At the end of each lecture he asks, “Are there any questions?” in a tone of voice that makes it plain he would much rather there weren’t. He needn’t worry—the students are as relieved as he is that the class is over. Mary knows very well she should read an assignment before every lecture. However, as the professor gives no quizzes and asks no questions, she soon realizes she needn’t prepare. At the end of the term she catches up by skimming her notes and memorizing a list of facts and dates. After the final exam, she promptly forgets much of what she has memorized. Some of her fellow students, disappointed at the impersonality of it all, drop out of college altogether. Others, like Mary, stick it out, grow resigned to the system and await better days when, as juniors and seniors, they will attend smaller classes and at last get the kind of personal attention real learning requires. I admit this picture is overdrawn—most universities supplement lecture courses with discussion groups, usually led by graduate students; and some classes, such as first-year English, are always relatively small. Nevertheless, far too many courses rely principally or entirely on lectures, an arrangement much loved by faculty and administrators but scarcely designed to benefit the students. One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter becomes clear to them. Even simply paying attention is very difficult; people can listen at a rate of four hundred to six hundred words a minute, while the most impassioned 2 professor talks at scarcely a third of that speed. This time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have sabotaged their attention span, but their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than the

Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and then have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. While it’s true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker’s next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word. Students need to question their professors and to have their ideas taken seriously. Only then will they develop the analytical skills required to think intelligently and creatively. Most students learn best by engaging in frequent and even heated debate, not by scribbling down a professor’s often unsatisfactory summary of complicated issues. They need small discussion classes that demand the common labors of teacher and students rather than classes in which one person, however learned, propounds his or her own ideas. The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. Questions that require the speaker to clarify obscure points and comments that challenge sloppily constructed arguments are indispensable to scholarship. Without them, the liveliest mind can atrophy. Undergraduates may not be able to make telling contributions very often, but lecturing insulates a professor even from the beginner’s naive question that could have triggered a fruitful line of thought. If lectures make so little sense, why have they been allowed to continue? Administrators love them, of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than into a discussion class, and for many administrators that is almost the end of the story. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture system alive and well. Lectures are easier on everyone than debates. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as students can pretend to learn by attending lectures, with no one the wiser, including the participants. Moreover, if lectures afford some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off. In a classroom where everyone contributes, students are less able to hide and professors less tempted to engage in intellectual exhibitionism. Smaller classes in which students are required to involve themselves in discussion put an end to students’ passivity. Students become actively involved when forced to question their own ideas as well as their instructor’s. Their listening skills improve dramatically in the excitement of intellectual give-and-take with their instructors and fellow students. Such interchanges help professors do their job better because they allow them to discover who knows what—before final exams, not after. When exams are given in this type of course, they can require analysis and synthesis from the students, not empty memorization. Classes like this require energy, imagination,

and commitment from professors, all of which can be exhausting. But they compel students to share responsibility for their own intellectual growth. Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university scene both because they seem to be economically necessary and because they spring from a long tradition in a setting that values tradition for its own sake. But the lectures too frequently come at the wrong end of the students’ educational careers—during the first two years, when they most need close, even individual, instruction. If lecture classes were restricted to junior and senior undergraduates and to graduate students, who are less in need of scholarly nurturing and more able to prepare work on their own, they would be far less destructive of students’ interests and enthusiasms than the present system. After all, students must learn to listen before they can listen to learn.

1. The word enhance in “techniques of active listening . . . can enhance the value of a lecture” (paragraph 10)

means a. ruin. b. ignore. c. increase. d. claim.

2. The word atrophy in “Without [questions and comments], the liveliest mind can atrophy” (paragraph 12)

means a. waste away. b. be unchanged. c. compete. d. strengthen.

3. Which of the following would be a good alternative title for this selection?

a. How to Benefit from Lecture Classes b. The Necessity of Classroom Lecturing c. Problems with Lecture Classes d. College Lectures: An Inspirational Tradition

4. Which sentence best expresses the main idea of the selection?

a. American colleges and universities are being attacked from many sides. b. Colleges and universities should offer interactive, not lecture, classes to first-year and second-year students. c. College graduates lack basic skills and general culture. d. American colleges and universities are modeled on German ones.

5. According to the author, the lecture system

a. encourages efficient learning. b. encourages students to ask questions. c. helps professors teach better. d. discourages students’ attendance and preparation.

6. An example of passive learning is

a. attending lectures. b. writing essays. c. doing experiments. d. debating a point.

7. To develop their thinking skills, students do not need to

a. bring tape recorders to class. b. question professors. c. debate. d. attend small discussion classes.

8. The author implies that large lecture classes

a. require students to have well-developed listening skills. b. encourage participation. c. are more harmful for juniors and seniors than for first-year students. d. are a modern invention.

9.True or False? Daniels suggests that small classes demand greater effort from both faculty and students.

10. The author implies that administrators love lectures because

a. students learn better in lectures. b. professors teach better through lecturing. c. schools make more money on lecture classes. d. professors can show off in lectures.