The Learning Paradigm College (review)

What are colleges for? This simple, but profound, question begins a new book, The Learning Paradigm College, authored by John Tagg, in which he argues that higher education has not reached its potential to produce student learning because it has supplanted ends by means. Tagg's premise is that learning, the primary "end" of college, cannot be achieved through the predominant "instructional paradigm of higher education" composed of fixed calendars, credit hours, and grades. He maintains that we have turned colleges into "factories for the production of full-time-equivalent students (FTES), transcript-generating machines" (p. 17). In these factories, student learning takes an inevitable back seat because of the unspoken rule, "Learn what you can in the time we make available" (p. 228). Learning may occur, but "the learning that can change your life and change your mind will almost always come too late for the course and the term" (p. 223).

Tagg's notion of the "learning paradigm college" is not new to American colleges and universities. This book grows out of an article coauthored with Robert Barr, "From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," published in Change magazine in 1995. This article, "arguably the most widely cited piece that Change ever published" (p. ix), generated both positive and negative reactions. But in the intervening years, its title has become a mantra for higher education, and the article has generated needed campus conversations about how learning can be achieved by working both within and around existing institutional structures.

As educators with a special interest in the first college year, this book resonates with our experience and that of our colleagues around the country. It helps articulate why we sometimes fall short of the educational transformation we intend. Tagg acknowledges the importance of innovation in the first year of college but observes that first-year seminars, learning communities, and supplemental instruction are just a few of the valuable strategies that are prone to becoming "innovations on the margins." He observes that particularly first-year seminars and orientation programs "begun with the best intentions" sometimes degenerate into lessons in "how to play the . . . game of surface learning, but play it skillfully" (p. 225). Tagg quotes Kay McClenney's observation: "the willingness to allow innovation on the margins is a way of containing it, preventing it from contaminating 'core functions'" . . . while "relieving pressure on the institution to create more essential change" (p. 11).

Tagg points out the obvious—"different students will learn in different domains at different rates" (p. 228). He comments on an absurd paradigm that governs much of developmental education—a core "first-year experience" for many of today's students: "Developmental programs at many colleges propose that students who have failed to develop proficiency in 12 years of formal schooling will do so in the first 16 weeks of college and move on" (p. 228). This observation about developmental education is also relevant to the broader college experience. Whether through previous schooling or the society at large, students often see college as something "to be gotten out of the way" (p. 6). Transforming that attitude takes more than a one-shot or one-term intervention.

Although Tagg's book represents a comprehensive articulation of "the problem," it does not stop there. He maintains that "the instruction paradigm is not an act of God . . . not even a natural disaster. It is an artifact of human ingenuity. We make it . . . [and] sustain it. . . and we can unmake it" (p. 308). He borrows from Harvard economist David Perkins the concept of "cognitive economy" and uses that concept throughout to differentiate components of the "hot cognitive economy" of the learning paradigm as opposed to the "cold cognitive economy" of the instruction paradigm. He also cites numerous examples of institutions that are making strides toward creating a hot cognitive economy...