Customer Reviews

A Learning College For The 21st Century: (American Council on Education Oryx Press Series on Higher Education)

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Mr. O'Banion's book does an honest and thorough job of explaining (exposing) an organizational culture that exists to serve its own needs first, and those of student learning and student achievment last. Every prospective community college and university student should read this book, and should then take very seriously the graduation/completion rate statistics being provided by the federally-mandated public disclosure law called the Student-Right-to-Know Act.

Although I have not read the book and therefore cannot comment on its content, I teach at a community college and have been exposed to the "learning college" model of education. I was skeptical because the term itself, "learning college," is redundant. As a colleague of mine, a veteran of the U.S. armed services, once quipped, "I guess you could say I was in the Flying Air Force." While we should all acknowledge that the student and his or her education should be the first-and-last order of business, what our administration was trying to do did not bode well for the quality of the education itself. For instance, the so-called "learning college" would standardize education to the point that my English comp course should be exactly like another's, and I mean exactly. In other words, if a student needed to change from my MWF comp class because of his work schedule, he could shift into another teacher's TTh class without problem. That looks like a good idea on paper, but what does that mean to the individual character of a course? Such a scenario is on the face of it student-centered, but to achieve such a reality is to standardize the life right out of your institution. One teacher's course is just like another because all we're doing, in this model, is "delivering content." Teaching a course is not like working on an assembly line.