Aitor, I find that this juxtapostion between the head and the heart are at the crux of so many modern problems. And there seems to be few indications that synthesis is in sight. The central idea that there is a truth that can be explored and examined rationally, that can be discussed, debated, and finally reached seems to be problematic on the modern university campus. Time constraints, budget cuts, as well as a raging culture war seem to inhibit the pursuit of this ideal.

We can say much and mean little.

To embrace learning it must, to whatever extent possible, be lived. The real struggle comes in living through the knowledge we discover from the hard facts of life, and the learning we acquire.

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Originally posted by Brian:
While in part I agree that university lectures play a valid role in exciting the student to acquire additional knowledge, I disagree with the premise that they must be "vivid" to do so. Aside from the problematic associations and nuance associated with the word "vivid" and a really clear exposition of what that means, there is the more important problem that the lecture or discourse as conceived of in the classical world was more then a rhetorical device designed to cause a student to "read more." Rather, as I see it, all of Plato's renderings of Socrates discourses are intended to be a direct attempt on the part of Socrates to explore the nature of a specific subject and gauge its truth or validity.

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Brian, superb comments. I teach in both the classroom and online environement using adult learning theory. This utilizes the Socratic method and the professor becomes a facilitator instead of a lecturer. The advantage in this, as you seem to be aware, is that students do not simply regurgitate facts, but they become involved in the learning process and are forced to seek answers - a far better way to retain information.

When I went to live in Germany it was with several years of high school and college German under my belt. And I could barely speak a lick. But once I was there I had to survive, and if I wanted to avoid eating the same thing day after day and only using my toilet at home, I had to learn to communicate. Necessity drove fluency. This is why adult learning theory is so effective: you need to find information to answer questions and have discussions.

Online learning is revolutionizing education, and while there will always be a place for lectures, the time spent on them will be shifted more to encouraging discussion and the exchange of ideas.

I’m not sure what “vivid” means when used to describe the subject matter of an academic lecture. I suppose it means something like “interesting.” If so, it’s hard to see how anyone could disagree with the idea that lectures ought be interesting. As Jacques Barzun once wrote, academic freedom does not include a right to be systematically boring.

I write more to respond to the idea, raised in some of the posts, that seminar-style student discussions are more valuable pedagogically than lectures in which the teacher does most of the talking. I think this is generally wrong, especially at the undergraduate level. My own experience, as both a student and a teacher, is entirely to the contrary.

For example, one of the courses I’ve taught is a year-long seminar for college freshman in which the readings comprise one great work of western literature per week, from Homer to T.S. Eliot. I always did by far the lion’s share of the talking in this class. I also always allowed students to interrupt to ask questions, because when one student has a question, usually several others have the same question, but I did never let an open-ended discussion develop among the students. My student evaluations have consistently proved that students appreciate this approach.

Nor is this result surprising. The simple fact is that instructors in university classes usually know much, much more about the text than do the students, and thus are much more likely to have valuable things to say to explain the text. The teacher has usually read the text a dozen times or more, read much else by the same author, studied the secondary literature, and pondered for many years the issues the text raises. That’s why he’s been hired as a teacher. The student, if he did the reading (and many students who have not done the reading participate in class discussions with alacrity), has read the text only once, and that very quickly and probably the night before. It would a miracle if, under these circumstances, the student’s views of the text were a fraction as good as those of the instructor. This is not to say that the instructor is smarter or better than his students; oftentimes, he’s not. But it is to say that, having spend much more time studying the text, he is in an incomparably better position to explain it.

It’s only the worse students who don’t appreciate this fact, the ones who don’t really understand why some judgments about the text are better than others. Such students tend to confuse learning with enjoyable conversations. These students, in my experience, are the ones who think they’re being robbed if they don’t have the opportunity to express their own views about the text.

This is not to say that discussing the text is not pedagogically valuable. To the contrary, such discussion can be very valuable, not because there’s much value in the student’s merely expressing his views but because there is great value if the student expresses his views and the instructor argues with him, forcing the student to defend or reformulate them. This requires an intense, extended engagement between two active minds. There is an appropriate place for such activity: it is the instructor’s office hours. By far some of the best learning experiences of my life have occurred as I sat in my dissertation advisor’s office and argued over philosophical issues with him. When this activity is transferred from the instructor’s office, where it belongs, to the classroom, where it does not, the result is that the discussion between the student and the teacher is not long enough to be really valuable to the student, and the other students get very little out of the experience. This kind of discussion is not a spectator sport. It is valuable, generally speaking, only to those actually participating in it.

So, my view is that lectures, presumably interesting, should attempt to explain the subject matter, paying special attention to clearing up misunderstandings that experience has shown to be particularly common. That’s a straightforward task, often not an easy one, but enough for any university instructor to do in an hour’s lecture.