A friend sent me the following link about the value of lectures in the humanities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/lecture-me-really.html
My response follows.
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I get the point, and I do agree that lectures can be good in certain contexts, but the professor who says lectures are important for teaching in the humanities is flat-out wrong in my experience. The small-group discussions that she says supplement the lectures are important, but the best humanities courses in my experience are very small ones where students can interact with the teacher and get questions answered during an engaged interchange.
Large lectures are efficient ways of conveying information, and they make teaching take up a much smaller part of a professor’s time than would several smaller, discussion-sized sessions–which is why universities like them.
And apart from entertainment value, a lecture where you can’t ask questions is simply a slower delivery of content than reading the same material.
I totally agree that note-taking is important because of the analysis that goes on, perhaps unconsciously, as one writes. And that writing something down helps facilitate its retrieval. But we can also teach students to take notes on written material.
I also agree that Socrates’s showing that knowledge is internal to us and only needs to be drawn out is crap.
Reflecting on what was said rather than preparing what one wants to say next is certainly a great skill. Lectures don’t provide it, however. Most of my friends in lecture courses may have taken notes, but the discussion sessions that supplemented large lectures could just as easily have been discussions about readings rather than lectures.
None of those facts/observations supports that large lectures are a good way to do anything but provide entertainment. Which, I suppose, is not devoid of worth if it’s the only way you can get people to take a class. But let’s not sanctify it as though it had mystical powers.
“Learning by doing” in the humanities is, perhaps, thinking, reflecting, writing, discussing. From that standpoint, they’ve been doing “learning by doing” for much longer and much better than math and science. But at its very best lecturing is only one small component of that process, and far from the most important one.
I still maintain that large lectures, while efficient, are essentially a sign of a program in which teaching is far from the most important component of a “professor’s” time.
To me, the better argument would be that in preparing a good lecture, a good teacher does much synthesis and analysis of material that no “internet research” can easily copy except in the hands of one already experienced in research. That, to my mind, is the value behind a good lecture.