Today, colleges and universities ar

Today, colleges and universities are under strong attack. Teachers are not doing a good job of teaching, and students are not doing a good job of learning. College graduates lack both basic skills and general knowledge. One aspect of college education, too seldom challenged, is the lecture system. 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 adjust the speed 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 400 to 600 words a minute, while the most enthusiastic professor talks at a much faster speed. 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 can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. What they do is usually write everything down. 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. 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 the professor’s. Classes like this require energy, imagination, and commitment from both the teacher and students. Students are compelled to share responsibility for their own intellectual growth. Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university both because they seem to be economically necessary and they spring from a long tradition. If lecture classes were restricted to junior and senior undergraduates, they would be far less destructive of students’ interest and enthusiasms than the present system.