This is a connect-the-dots post. One form of connection is from the past to the present. My blog started back in 2005 and some of the references that I linked to in posts during the first year were from pieces written earlier than that. So I will take snippets from several of these early posts to make the case that what was happening then in higher education offered a reasonably good foreshadowing of what is happening now. A different but related connection is that issues within higher education seem to mirror issues within society as a whole. Then, a third connection is about the search for resolutions of these issues. I've tried a variety of these, each of which has failed (mainly because I offered them up as a theoretical possibility but had no way to implement them). It does seem that to date societal imposed solutions have made matters worse. Is it possible for there to be effective solutions that do improve matters?
Now let me take a lesson from some recent TV shows I've watched, which go back and forth between the present and the foreshadowing events that happened earlier. I will mention two pieces I've read in the last couple of days that discuss current major social issues. One of those is this opinion piece by Chris Hayes about boredom, I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own. I struggled with this piece, first because initially I thought it was about why people voted for Trump, but that turned out to be a just a throw-away line. Then later I felt that while the premise is probably right, boredom is widespread, there were many points that might have been made but weren't, so the picture Hayes paints is far from complete. I will get to some of my criticisms later in this post.
The other piece is from the Chronicle of Higher Education by Beckie Supiano, Some Assembly Still Required
How K-12 reforms and recent disruptions created Gen Z’s baffling habits. I was much more in agreement with what was said in this piece, though I believe there is a tendency to attribute most of the problems to Covid, and not consider trends in (non)learning that were forming prior to Covid. Certainly, at the Higher Ed level, the student mental health crisis was manifest in 2019, if not earlier. Covid exacerbated the situation but wasn't the initial cause.
Now let me go to the foreshadowing. In a post from June 2005 called Connections Across Cohorts of Students, I referenced a piece that George Kuh had written for Change Magazine back in 2003, What We're Learning About Student Engagement from NSSE. Kuh's essay offers us language for the antonym of boredom, engagement. But, more importantly, this paragraph which I quoted in full in my post is worth reproducing even now.
And this brings us to the unseemly bargain, what I call the "disengagement
compact": "I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone." That is, I won't make
you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won't have to grade as
many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this
bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many
students get decent grades--B's and sometimes better. There seems to be a
breakdown of shared responsibility for learning--on the part of faculty members
who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part
of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions
provide.
I would argue that the disengagement compact is still alive and well in Higher Ed, though campuses like Illinois worked in certain very specific areas (notably undergraduate research) so they could score higher in those metrics that NSSE focused on and so as not to have to face the issue head on. And Supiano's piece makes it seem that K-12 is also witnessing the disengagement compact. I don't have any evidence, one way or the other, whether the workplace offers yet another locus for the disengagement compact, yet I would not find it surprising if others could readily provide such evidence.
Over the years, I've been somewhat idealistic as to how to address these social issues. Maslow has been my hero this way and self-actualization seems the evident answer to the prayer that such a solution might be found. Another post from the first year of my blog entitled, Maslow, gives some then relevant examples of self-actualizers and provides a link to this site, which offers a primer on Maslow's work. It also offers a list of attributes a self-actualizer will exhibit, which I thought would make for a good set of aspirations for any student. The list is reproduced below:
Truth, rather than dishonesty.
Goodness, rather than evil.
Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity.
Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not
arbitrariness
or forced choices.
Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life.
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity.
Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or
accident.
Completion, rather than incompleteness.
Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness.
Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity.
Richness, not environmental impoverishment.
Effortlessness, not strain.
Playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery.
Self-sufficiency, not dependency.
Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.
The questions I asked myself then are whether an ordinary student can be encouraged to become a self-actualizer, if becoming a self-actualizer was mainly nurture rather than nature, and if it is possible to make up for lost time when early forms of nurture prove insufficient in this dimension. I'm still asking myself these questions now.
But on one point, I think clarification should be given now. Sometimes, the Hierarchy of Needs is interpreted too primitively - when some of the being needs are not satisfied then that fully blocks the possibility of self-actualization. This is not right. In a post from 2013 called Some thoughts on the new Campus Strategic Plan, I quoted directly from Maslow's book, which gives a more nuanced view:
If we wish to help humans to become more fully human, we must realize not only that they try to realize themselves, but that they are also reluctant or afraid or unable to do so. Only by fully appreciating this dialectic between sickness and health can we help to tip the balance in favor of health.
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
The dialectic between realizing oneself and being unable to do so is in all of us. Some may be more able to attain a better balance, but nobody is all of one and none of the other. If that's right, then encouraging someone to self-actualize must help both with those behaviors directly but also with managing the inevitable bits of sickness, bits which most of us are loathe to talk about.
Now let me get to my criticisms of the piece by Chris Hayes. There are things he should have taken up, but didn't. First, he didn't talk at all about time spent with friends. His focus was on solitary activity. Extroverts, in particular, get their mental sustenance from having conversation with others. Hayes could have written something about this, including that loneliness is prevalent nowadays, even when there is electronic communication with others, though that is better than no communication whatsoever. But loneliness didn't get a mention. Sticking with this theme about conversation, I wrote about my personal take on it in a post called, The virtues of making it up as you go along. In that post I made reference to this paper by Kenneth Bruffee, Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind", which relates conversation to thinking and to writing. They form the vertices of a triangle. Hayes would benefit from reading Bruffee's paper. And, perhaps anticipating reading Bruffee's paper by a decade, I wrote a series of 7 posts on Inward Looking Service Learning, which was about how to promote conversation between more experienced students and other students just getting started, in the belief that such conversations would encourage learning, with that general idea then applied to a variety of contexts.
I did something similar in my own teaching in the late 1990s, though I paid the more experienced students rather than try to give them course credit for doing the work. The latter idea comes from the observation that helping/mentoring/teaching others offers its own lessons about how to communicate, and those lessons are quite valuable. Alas, this idea never saw the light of day on my campus because institutional practice ran too far afield from heavily relying on undergraduates to support instruction. Further, though there is the alternative of conversations between students and instructors during office hours, and back in 2007 I wrote a rather extensive post about this alternative called Rethinking Office Hours, my experience in teaching the one course a year I taught in retirement till Covid is that most students are too shy to attend office hours. The shyness is explained by the fear of looking stupid in front of an authority figure. Students would rather forego the experience entirely as a consequence.
Indeed, Hayes could have spent some time in his piece on considering fear of failure and its relationship to boredom. In particular, Hayes might have made mention of Later, a book review by James Surowiecki, which talks about procrastination. It leads off with an example that features George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize winning economist. That Akerlof procrastinates in some circumstances is the writer's way of saying that everybody does. And then Hayes could have amplified matters with the following sort of question. Are we engaged in fun things while we procrastinate or are we bored then to seemingly punish ourselves for not engaging in the task we should be doing? I don't know the answer to that question, in general, but I can say that I procrastinated some in writing this post and I confess that I was bored some during that time.
I do want to look at the other end of the tunnel, after the task has been completed. Over the years I've learned you can't always be on. After a period of high stress, there is a need to decompress, to relax, and then recuperate. Similarly, after a long period of high concentration, which may not have been stressful but which was quite intense nonetheless, there needs to be some time to veg out. Yet we are creatures of habit. Might those down time intervals get longer, just because we get used to what that feels like? If so, does that encourage us to be bored?
Hayes might have also taken on multiprocessing, supposedly our way of dealing with information overload, but does that too encourage boredom? And then he might have talked about exceptions that prove the rule, folks who are fully engaged in the task at hand. Does that mean they are self-actualizing?
I have two distinct recent examples. This essay by Louise Glück, Writing As Transformation, is a personal story of a writer who at a very young age seemed to already understand her life's path, and that for her writing was completely absorbing as an activity and as a means for personal growth. Others might read this piece just to learn that it is possible to be so inspired. But I suspect that for other writers the story is different, as it was different for me. I had a preference for face-to-face conversation or, if you will, argument with a friend, done over a coffee, and on a recurrent basis, say for a couple of hours once or twice a week. (When I was under 30, it might have been later in the day and then done over a beer.) When I was a campus administrator for educational technology, I had such colleagues who had parallel jobs at peer institutions. Being with them was very pleasurable for this reason. But, it wasn't frequent enough. I had many ideas swirling around in my head that needed to find some form of expression. I started this blog as an alternative to these conversations. After a couple of weeks of posting without letting anyone else know about the blog, writing blog posts became a habit for me. A few months later, Scott Leslie wrote a post about my blog and it soon became known within the edu blog universe. ( A few years after that I had to move the blog off of the campus server, Guava, and relocated it to Blogspot, losing quite a few subscribers in the process. Some years after that I dropped Technology from the blog's Title, though not in the url as I didn't want to lose more subscribers then.)
The other example is from the world of sports. I'm a fan of Illinois Men's Basketball. I not only watch the games but also watch the post-game press conferences on YouTube, which features Coach Underwood and also a couple of players who did well in the game. It is interesting to hear both coach and players talk about the intensity of practice and that to perform at a high level in a game, the players need to do that first in practice. This level of intensity is for physical performance and I wonder if Maslow, were he still alive, would term what the players do as self-actualization. I also want to note that I've watched a bunch of short television series about men in a military setting engaging in fierce combat of some sort. The esprit de corps among these men is very similar to the feel one has about the Illini basketball players. The achievements are a team effort, though in a particular instance individual effort does matter. Yet there doesn't seem to be any within team competition. All the competition is with the team they are playing against. This intensity is quite the opposite of boredom.
The fans also share in this intensity. While I only watch on TV these days, I still feel it when viewing the game from home. But, it is hard as a fan to maintain this when it's known that the team is mediocre. I used to be a fan of the New York Knicks in basketball and the New York Giants in football, but I stopped watching both pro sports years ago because there just wasn't enough pull to keep me going (and I was a fan of New York teams while living in Central Illinois).
I want to mention a couple of solutions I've attempted, as theoretical exercises, to promote self-actualization in our students. The first one was about developing an explicit program for teaching intuition. Students should be encouraged to express their curiosity about a subject and see where that leads. They should then drive the inquiry that follows from the questions they have generated up front. The thought was that if this is done on a repeated basis, the interplay between the questions and the inquiry would help teach what makes for good questions up front as well as how to conduct an inquiry that really does address the questions. So, I started to draft a book which I called Guessing Games, to pursue this idea, with each chapter a stand alone essay on a particular sub-theme. While it started out well, and I was happy with the early chapters, I eventually hit a snag that I didn't know how to resolve. The chapters themselves needed to be written in the style of inquiry, but I have a very strong tendency to lecture, and revert to that in my writing quite often. The last few chapters I wrote seemed like lecturing to me, and it caused me to lose interest in the project. This does not mean that the underlying idea is bad. It does mean, however, that for the underlying idea to see the light of day in a completed work, I need a co-author who embraces these themes, or some other writer needs to write a complete work on these ideas, taking my early chapters as a launch point for that.
The other solution is a site I set up during Covid to encourage college students who were then time abundant to embrace a program that would have them read more and teach themselves about learning-to-learn. I called this the Non-Course. (If you go to that site, it would be better to read the various tabbed pages before going to the Non-Course Blog, which then gives an overview of a self-directed program that might be followed.) I never had any students to try it out. (Generating ideas like the Non-Course is something I do okay. Marketing those ideas is a different matter, one where I'm pretty much clueless.). I want to note that the self-help sites Chris Hayes mentions in his essay are meant to be fully consumed in a matter of minutes. These two possible solutions that I've linked to require a far greater time commitment. Are my possible solutions DOA just because of that?
Let me wrap up. I don't normally ask myself whether I had been self-actualizing. I ask a different, but perhaps related question. Was I so absorbed in the activity that I completely lost track of myself. This could be while reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to music. It's not just from the writing activity or really the pre-writing - letting the imagination wander to figure out, in general, what I plan to say in the piece. It's different in editing mode, where I'm more self-critical and therefore not so unaware of self. I've found over time a transference in my own focus from pre-writing to an emphasis on editing (though I can't say that my proofreading is above suspicion in spite of this transference). Some of this, I believe, is health related. I'm a geezer and the various aches and pains get in the way of being fully absorbed. It wasn't that way 20 years ago. Another part may be less stimulation from which I feel a need to write in order to make sense of what I'm experiencing. It is different to blog when you are working full time than when you are retired. With the former, there is a lot going on and a need to get the blog post done, to get back to the day job and so the thinking can move on to other matters. In retirement there is less going on and less urgency to get things done. And further, my audience now is mainly bots. I have a few human readers, but not too many. Does that matter? Should it matter? With a large audience the writer may feel some obligation to the readers. There is no such obligation with bots.
I read Toward a Psychology of Being fairly early in my career as an ed tech administrator. Doing so was part of my regime to self-instruct about how people learn. I recall that at the time I felt that Maslow was speaking directly to me. I read it again somewhat later, and while it didn't produce quite the same reaction, I did find the re-read rewarding. Yet after that I had a work colleague who had a PhD from the College of Education who reported reading it for one of her classes, but not getting much out of it at all. Frankly, I couldn't say whether that was because her inclinations are different from mine or if reading as an opt in activity is quite different from reading in a course when that is required by the instructor. Indeed, my own inclinations also lead me to read a book of Maslow's later essays, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Within that collection there are essays about Maslow's belief that creativity and self-actualization are intimately linked. He utilized an expression that I really liked - the creative attitude. Now, I don't know how to get this done, but I have a sense that a voluntary reading group on Maslow aimed at those confronting current learning issues would be quite helpful. It wouldn't provide the answers, but it might very well encourage the asking of interesting questions that aren't currently being considered.
