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Samantha Rush
Miller
ENG 111.P105
7 April 2013
The Challenging Aftermath of the Lack of Challenge in Education
There is an underlining theme detected in the collection of articles which may cause a
devastating hindrance to the resolution applicable to any disenfranchised student; the lack of
challenge and failure for the educational system to grant the student the right of passage to a
critical engagement in learning. Students are limited to challenge their minds to the few items of
the teachers or school curriculum choosing which filters the critique a student will engage in and
substantially narrow their experiences with raising to challenges and critical thinking. This
problem hits home to a vast majority of students and the tricky thing is the impossible task
students and teachers have in figuring out what will resolve this problem. It is clear to me that
this educational community, who is evaluating and brain-storming this problem, and are split on
the best way to teach. From all their knowledge and experience, the educational community has
brought students option A, development through exploration learning such as teachers taking
some time and energy to listen to students to meet the needs of the individual student, which
works towards reframing the traditional preconceived notions about education and student
ability; or option B in contrast to A, where teacher rich instructional learning omits
communicative learning and disables critical thinking skills, reinforces teacher social status in
the classroom and breeds conformity and where students summarization is valued as the right
answer even if the student does not comprehend . Students must actively seek to know and
understand the obvious and subtle variances of both option A and B in regards to their learning
because this knowledge is power and students are entitled to be empowered by and through their
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education. The lack of challenge proves problematic to teachers and students in either learning
option mentioned as it establishes the foundations for conformity and standardization choking
out vital critical reflective experiences which are endured throughout the pursuit of higher
education.
Finding an even, across the board baseline for teaching all kinds of students is one of the
main responsibilities of the education system. This baseline expectation is established outside the
classroom where those who are required to meet decided standards have no part in the process.
In Mike Roses’ article The Politics of Remediation, he clearly shows how this imperfect
educational system fails teachers and students as students are “…limited exposure to certain
kinds of writing and reading…” (Rose 10), indicating that the system creates an impossible
situation in that the students must know what the teachers haven’t taught. Likewise to this
limitation, ideas or philosophies of learning such as transformative learning, are withheld from
forming minds and offers another hindrance in the classroom. In ‘Transformative Learning:
Theory to Practice’, Jack Mezirow calls attention to this shortcoming in our early education
system that, “transformative learning requires a form of education very different from that
commonly associated with children” (Mezirow 10), which reinforces the need of an educational
foundation build not on restricting challenges in learning with conformity and standardization
but on encouragement of the engagement of critical thinking through in-class discourse.
Limiting the challenges students are made to experience hinders their practical growth and
development in real world settings which they will continue to find themselves in long after
receiving their diploma. In his article ‘Why Learn,’ John Tagg would call this limiting learning
style summarization, where there is no challenge for students to engage in deep-surface
processing, they instead “…simply tried to remember points in order, as doing surface-level
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processing” (Tagg 5), teachers only hit the highlights of the subject and fail to challenge the
students to strive for that deep-level processing. Another way in which the educational system
fails to challenge students is by holding low expectations of younger students; this poses the
larger problem, as pointed out by David Bartholomea in ‘Inventing the University’ where he
bridges together that the average student is unprepared for college level writing and they must
deal with diversity too broad and too fast "…[they] must learn to try on a variety of voices and
interpretative schemes- to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and as an experimental
psychologist the next…" (Bartholomea 209). Limiting students’ exposure, cultivating a false
value in summarization and failing to challenge students early on, all contribute to the students’
inability to engage in critical learning, much like mechanical teaching does. These roots of
learning bring forth the lifeline of all future learning.
The lack of challenge resulting from mechanical teaching also fails the student in
learning critical thinking skills. Mechanical teaching is another form of summarization, where
the students simply go through the motions by what Davis Bartholomea claims in ‘Inventing the
University’ “…by assembling and mimicking…” (Bartholomea 209) what the teacher is
instructing. Students don’t know what they don’t know, and many teachers teach by examples
which limits students to only what the teacher tells them therefore, restricting students from
venturing beyond the classroom and to develop their skills on their own. Mike Rose could make
a good point for using this teaching style in his description of students as “…literate people
straining at the boundaries of their ability, trying to move into the unfamiliar, to approximate a
kind of writing they can’t yet command” (Rose 11) in his article ‘The Politics of Remediation.
This is not saying that Rose supports this as the one and only way, but rather as one part of a
question remains that would mechanical teaching strip away the personal voice and thinking of
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the student? Mezirow is quite clear on the roles the students and teachers undertake in the
process of classroom educating; “[the learners] is to become autonomous, responsible thinkers”
(Mezirow 8) which blooms mainly from the ability to critically reflect on information; whereas
“the educators responsibility is to help learners reach their objectives in such a way that they will
function as more autonomous, socially responsible thinkers” (Mezirow 8), which by all accounts
is not taught through summarization and mechanical teaching. Even though mechanical teaching
is helpful for students during times they are stuck, this quick fix stifles the student ability to
navigate through critical analysis and even the challenge of meeting their future. John Tagg
claims witness to this phenomenon in ‘Why Learn’ when he recalls how “[m]any students do not
seriously entertain the idea of substantial development of change in an academic setting” (Tagg
7). When teachers and students fall into this lack of challenge, where the student’s critical
thinking is not of their own but of their teachers, the educational system has failed the students
encounter with developing their own critical thinking.
Standardized grading creates a lack of challenge in two polar ways; for students who
easily grasp the material taught and for students who struggle to grasp that same material.
Teachers are locked into specific parameters to judge competency, which for students who this
level is easily attainable there is not much challenge in expanding their critical thinking, and
likewise, for students who struggle to attain proof of competency or fall just short of it the
standardized grading actually robs students of the satisfaction challenges could bring that they
ultimately give up. Mike Rose sees the dangers of the educational system measuring students in a
standard way as he directs attention to “…the policy documents and the crisis reports was that
they focused too narrowly on test scores and tallies of error and other such measures” (Rose 10).
With this fact weighing in every students’ mind, the gravity of their whole future cripples their
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creativity, which is another factor of the student’s critical thinking ability which lack of
challenge suffocates. Students stop thinking in conceptual critical thinking ways and begin to
give answers they think the teacher wants to here. Evidence of what this does to students is found
in ‘Inventing the University’, where David Bartholomea recalls when a student who “…knew
that the university faculty would be reading and evaluating his essay, and so he wrote for them”
(Bartholomea 211). Students place higher value on meeting the expectation of standardized tests
then digging for the nuggets of gold found in true deep-level processing, and this imbalanced
way of thinking is perpetuated in the educational system which fails to challenge students true
aptitude. Mezirow would site that the lack of challenge standardization poses prevents the true
nature of the student teacher dynamic in the classroom, as “the educator functions as a facilitator
and provocateur rather than as an authority on subject matter” (Mezirow 11). The challenge the
statement raises calls for teachers and students to engage in forms of discourse to develop critical
thinking skills, notwithstanding, is not cultivated through standardization but rather in intervals
of personal and unscripted interaction. John Tagg tells the story of two students who were both
let down by the lack of challenge standardization creates within the educational system. Each
student experienced his class in the same polar way that standardized grading creates a lack of
challenge. “[o]ne student excelled and one flunked. Yet a year later the grade has ceased to be
valid evidence of much of anything” (Tagg 3). Failing to challenge students puts then through a
filter where they are striped of creative ways of thinking critically. Not all students are equal and
no two students will ever possess identical evaluation scores even with standardization.
The lack of challenge is not bound to the limited exposure students receive, the
mechanicalness of teaching nor the standardization of grading, however these contributing
factors add to the failure of the educational system in fostering critical engagement in learning. A
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direct assault on teachers argue that various teaching styles are inappropriate and or ineffective,
such as mechanical teaching style of David Bartholomae, or the notion of truly learning is not
measured in grades as John Tagg would believe. On the other hand, students must make the
choice to break free from their social and cultural hindrances as Mike Rose would urge teachers
and be aware of the importance critical reflectiveness is to the learner as Jack Mezirow would
add, to fulfill their pursuit of education. The implications of the lack of challenge had on the
effects of learning puts students into autopilot where they conform to the standards of the
educational system without stopping to think for themselves. There is no one right answer to this
puzzle either and until the educational community see all factors as equally disruptive in a
student’s educational experience, there will continue to be discourse.
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Work Cited
Composing Knowledge: Reading for College Writers. Inventing the University, (ISBN
10:0-312-15313-9)
Mezirow, Jack. “Transformative Learning: Theory to Pratice.” New Direction for Adult and
Continuing Education, no. 74. Jossey-Brass Publishers, Summer 1997. 5-12. Print.
Rose, Mike. “The Politics of Remediation.” Conversations in Context: Identity,
Knowledge, and College Writing. Ed. K Fitzgerald et al. Fort Worth, TX. Harcourt Brace
College Publishers, 1998. 23-45.
Tagg, John. “Why Learn? What We May Really Be Teaching Students” About Campus
March- April 2004: 2-10. Print.