7 The Implications of Authentic Learning

Some readers might have mixed feelings about these tech narratives. Could these celebratory accounts be more hype than substance? I am confident my account accurately captures the reality that the students narrated. On the other hand, their words are all we have. The encounter was ad hoc. We were not invited to observe. And the students who narrated their experience might have been exceptional rather than the norm. We have no way of knowing whether most of the other participants felt the same way.

You might also be wondering: can this work for me? Do I teach any classes where I could expect similar results of stepping aside and letting my students take charge of their learning?

There are also deeper issues and controversies about what examples like this say about what we ought or might do to reform twenty first century education. Should we rethink our role as teachers or ignore these narratives?

To some investors, higher education is the largest “undisrupted” industry that remains. They are eager to shake the money tree, by unraveling universities using new teaching modalities. Consider the success of Coursera and the rise of MOOCs and podcasts. But to those of us inside universities, our work is already disrupted. There are changes we might be enthusiastic about, which might include inclusive teaching practices, and things we are less enthusiastic about (you can fill in the blank). Where does contemporary authentic learning fit? The conversation is rollicking and contentious. A simplified, schematic version follows.

Option 1: The End of the University as We Know It?

One possible lesson we might draw from these examples is that students work best when faculty get out of their way. That conclusion has some powerful advocates. One proponent of that plan, a Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel, has been offering fellowships to students who skip university. That’s correct. A condition of accepting a Thiel fellowship is agreeing not to attend any college (Clynes, 2018). Not only does he encourage students to skip college, Thiel also leverages his reputation as a successful investor who has picked several “winners” to add ballast to his prediction that the end of the university system is nigh. Universities, in his view, are archaic institutions that have outlived their usefulness. They will soon disappear and faculty as well.

For obvious reasons, almost no one employed in higher ed likes that argument.

Option 2: Defending Higher Education

A contrary response defends higher ed and suggests that these tales of self-educating students are at best exaggerations and at worst pure hype. The Netscape narrative distorts reality and were we to embrace it as an exemplar, we would necessarily fail the vast majority of our students. It is certain that very few aspiring entrepreneurs will become billionaires. According to Forbes, in April 2022, there were considerably less than 3,000 billionaires extant in the world. Even if you admire Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, they are not role models for the majority. In the end, most of our students will end up working for someone else. And for that great majority of non-entrepreneurs, a traditional college degree will bring benefits, albeit very unevenly (Fischer, 2022).

A few critics have gone much farther and challenged Thiel’s disparagement of the liberal arts and the traditional university (Daub, 2020). Have Thiel and his merry band of billionaires and innovators added anything of real civic or cultural value to the world? Is minting new billionaires like Peter Thiel an accomplishment to celebrate? Is a world with Twitter, Facebook, Google– or Paypal, for that matter, where Thiel first found success– really a better world than our world circa 1993, before the Mosaic browser, when none of this existed?

Perhaps our world would be a better place if these youthful entrepreneurs had finished their degrees and developed a richer appreciation of history, literature, politics, ethics, and value? Isn’t there ample evidence that their digital innovations are running amok, destroying livelihoods recklessly, even undermining democracy itself?

A variant on this critique refuses to lay the blame on innovative students and suggests that venture capitalists relentlessly overpowered and redirected their visions, which were often quite utopian. Mark Zuckerberg, afterall, wanted to make the world more open and connected. And the mission statement of Google was initially simply Do no evil. If angel investors like Thiel are the source of what ails us, why should we try to appease them?

Option 3: The View from the Center- Reform

No one will be surprised to learn that the most popular position among leaders in higher education is reforming the university. On one hand, reform rejects shutting down the university, and at the same time reformers refuse to shut tech out. The challenge then becomes aligning the tech revolutions and the new landscape of work with the university as we know it– and that will require change. The fact that many of our most successful entrepreneurs had to leave universities to be creative exposes deep flaws in higher education. But, reasons for change go beyond technological backwardness and vocational misalignment. Even defenders of universities agree that unequal access, unequal outcomes, and the crippling weight of student debt demand change.

And there are many calls for change. It won’t surprise teaching faculty to learn that administrative reformers prefer to lay the blame for these failures at the feet of teaching faculty, or, less directly, at what are assumed to be their favored methods of instruction.

Their assessments can be very harsh. For example, Cathy Davidson is no fan of Peter Thiel, but this is how she opens her recent reflection on the future of American higher education:

… the 21 million students in college today… have been given a raw deal… [their] schooling… was developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to train farmers… to be factory workers… We’re still going to school the way we did in 1993, which is to say, pretty much as we did in 1893 (Davidson, 2017: 4,6)

Ouch.

How does this relate to authentic learning? Discussions of the future of higher education and the fate of teaching faculty are in frequently interwoven with discussions of authentic learning. Again and again, one encounters proposals for saving the university that extoll one part or another of the authentic learning bundle. As you ponder that, consider again my discussion of historical antecedents of authentic learning. The cutting edge reforms Cathy Davidson proposes to move teaching into the twenty-first century turn out to have been proposed quite some time ago – actually  pretty close to 1893. Moreover, they managed to persist across the length of the twentieth century in a few odd, hidden corners of the university where marginal departments like anthropology have offices.