So has everyone simply stopped thinking?

A few recent posts have been about my observation in my class that some students weren't engaged, more than I expected. I was aware that I might be over-generalizing.

But, in the last two weeks, while finishing my last paper and dealing with a hospital stay, I ran across two other authors with similar recent observations - one for undergraduates, and one for medical residents. They both are equally puzzled as to whether they are just noticing this, or whether something real has changed in the just last few years.

Since the early Greeks, at least, every generation seems to feel the next generation isn't really doing very well, so we have to start with some skepticism.

But, for what it's worth, here's a brief summary of two recent books.

My Freshman Year - What a Professor learned by Becoming a Student, is by a cultural anthropology professor (pseudonym Rebekah Nathan) who put it this way:

After more than fifteen years of university teaching, I found that students had become increasingly confusing to me. Why don't undergraduates ever drop by for my office hours unless they are in dire trouble in a course? ... How could some of my students never take a note during my big lecture class? ...

Are students today different? Doesn't it seem like they're .. cheating more? Ruder? Less motivated?... Why is the experience of leading class discussion sometimes like pulling teeth? Why won't my students read the assigned readings so we can have a decent class discussion? [emphasis added].

Here' some excerpts from the book How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman, M.D. Dr. Groopman "holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He has published more than 150 scientific articles and is a staff writer at The New Yorker."

The idea for his book came to him, as he describes it, in 2004. He continues:

I follow a Socratic method in the discussion, encouraging the [medical ] students and [medical ] residents to challenge each other, and challenge me, with their ideas. But at the end of rounds on that September morning I found myself feeling disturbed. I was concerned about the lack of give-and-take among the trainees....[they] all too often failed to question cogently or listen carefully or observe keenly.... Something was profoundly wrong with the way they were learning to solve clinical puzzles and care for people. [emphasis added]

He also asks himself if this isn't just the same old intergenerational bias, and concludes:

But on reflection I saw that there were also major flaws in my own medical training. What distinguished my learning from the learning of my young trainees was the nature of the deficiency, the type of flaw.

Dr. Groopman goes on to consider whether this is the fault of efforts to follow preset algorithms, like computers, instead of actually thinking, or on "evidence based" thinking that is linear and algorithmic, and incapable of going outside the box when the situation calls for it.

I have further thoughts, but those will wait for another post. At least I am in good company in thinking that something very important has just changed in our youth.

A good epidemiologist would next wonder how widespread is this? Is this also true in Europe? In Asia? In Africa? Only in North America? In Canada? Is this something we can go back and reanalyze existing data sets and trace an "epidemic curve" on to see when it began and if it has peaked or is still rising? And, of course, if real, is this a change in the students, or a change in the way the older generation perceives students?

And, finally, with the "Where?" and "When?" nailed down, we could look at "Why?" and "How?" and then work our way to "What to do to fix it."


Wade