The first full-length history of college teaching in the United
States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds
new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly
ideal-scientific, objective, and dispassionate-and the inevitably
subjective nature of day-to-day instruction. American college
teaching is in crisis, or so we are told. But we've heard that
complaint for the past 150 years, as critics have denounced the
poor quality of instruction in undergraduate classrooms. Students
daydream in gigantic lecture halls while a professor drones on, or
they meet with a teaching assistant for an hour of aimless
discussion. The modern university does not reward teaching, so
faculty members at every level neglect it in favor of research and
publication. In the first book-length history of American college
teaching, Jonathan Zimmerman confirms but also contradicts these
perennial complaints. Drawing upon a wide range of previously
unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of
undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received. But
Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it,
especially by making teaching more "personal." As higher education
grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and
universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms
designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction. They also
experimented with new technologies like television and computers,
which promised to "personalize" teaching by tailoring it to the
individual interests and abilities of each student. But, Zimmerman
reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the
professionalization of college teaching, which remains, ultimately,
an amateur enterprise. The more that Americans treated teaching as
a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the
instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it.
Nor have they rigorously documented college instruction, a highly
public activity which has taken place mostly in private. Pushing
open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American
college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate
learning communities, especially for America's least privileged
students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to
start here.
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