> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be.
Agreed here.
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
Don't think it's quite so simple to draw the line here. Or, at least, my anecdata doesn't support this. As someone who teaches undergraduate students in STEM at a public ivy, who mostly has friends in comparable positions in the humanities (poetry, creative writing, that kinda thing), when we chat about the goings-on in our respective classes we all come to the same conclusion regardless of academic background: students are just incurious in general. Not all, but most. 80%-90% maybe. They spend a lot of effort optimizing exactly to the requirements of every assignment, treating the work as transactional – I check the boxes, you award the points. This forces teachers to adapt their teaching style to a different set of expectations.
Teaching any material past purely practical knowledge for the exam is usually met with blank stares. While this could certainly say more about my rhetorical abilities as lecturer than it does about "kids these days", it's pretty clear to see that college in the US has become nothing more than a glorified credentialing institution. I wonder if this doesn't have something to do with the way public schools are run, mostly teaching to the test and thus preparing students how to retain only the information necessary for success by that metric.
If our cultural expectation of college is that it provides job training and nothing else, then students' attitudes (consciously or not) are going to reflect that.
Agreed here.
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
Don't think it's quite so simple to draw the line here. Or, at least, my anecdata doesn't support this. As someone who teaches undergraduate students in STEM at a public ivy, who mostly has friends in comparable positions in the humanities (poetry, creative writing, that kinda thing), when we chat about the goings-on in our respective classes we all come to the same conclusion regardless of academic background: students are just incurious in general. Not all, but most. 80%-90% maybe. They spend a lot of effort optimizing exactly to the requirements of every assignment, treating the work as transactional – I check the boxes, you award the points. This forces teachers to adapt their teaching style to a different set of expectations.
Teaching any material past purely practical knowledge for the exam is usually met with blank stares. While this could certainly say more about my rhetorical abilities as lecturer than it does about "kids these days", it's pretty clear to see that college in the US has become nothing more than a glorified credentialing institution. I wonder if this doesn't have something to do with the way public schools are run, mostly teaching to the test and thus preparing students how to retain only the information necessary for success by that metric.
If our cultural expectation of college is that it provides job training and nothing else, then students' attitudes (consciously or not) are going to reflect that.