The Shrinking of Spaces For Intellectual Leisure: Why Are Seminars Growing Quiet?
Writer: Lauren LaCalamita
Editor: Maryam Khan
Here at Havergal College every student knows the heat of the seminar table, whether you’re frantically flipping through notes, observing in silence while mentally crafting your reflection, or constantly interjecting and contradicting. It all ends the same, collecting your papers while debriefing the discussion like a post-game interview with peers. However, these days the tables seem quieter, the seas have calmed, and tension hangs over most discussions. Some students have found themselves reminiscing about the high-strung and idea-frenzied dynamic of the seminar table; where has it gone? This article will explore the causes behind a dulled seminar, as well as the fall in student productivity and intellectual appetite.
To be clear from the get-go, there is no absence of intellectual curiosity or willingness to learn within the classroom. Rather, some would speculate that the root lies beyond the table, a world constantly teetering between chaos and constant crises. What's more, is that now every student has access to a handheld device which folds distance, urgency, and attention into one neat pile, easily fitting into a back pocket. Limiting screen time is just closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. Students have access to laptops, iPads, and their phones outside of school hours, where feeds have been curated to push terror onto their screens.
Each generation has indeed had to face some kind of world-altering events in which they believed their lives would be threatened or changed for the worse. The internet, the Cold War, and even the Industrial Revolution had people questioning the viability of their future. However, turning off the TV or the radio and going to school or playing a sport was enough to keep these existentially pessimistic thoughts at bay. Today, most teens scroll before they fall asleep and scroll once they open their eyes eight hours later. The narrative that students are disengaged in the class points to a larger problem of students stuck in a perpetual cycle of intellectual burnout. It's one thing to read and annotate sources in preparation for a discussion; it's another to do that work and then discuss it further at lunch, at dinner, and in the comment section of hundreds of posts. Every social science class gestures toward contemporary application, yet these realities have already saturated most students’ lives. The table becomes grounds for repetition, where global issues are discussed as another check to hit on a rubric, rather than from a place of discovery or inquiry.
A study by researchers Havrylets Y. et al. claims that “Among the participants suffering from a large information overload and losing emotional sensitivity… emotional burnout in the stage of development leads to personal discomfort and aggravation of perceptual reactions in response to negative TV news” (Havrylets, 2019). It is clear that disengagement is not an active choice but the product of constant negative news exposure, which is only catalyzed by the effects of social media and its ability to spread information rapidly. Emotional burnout is directly linked with the ability to process new information (Havrylets, 2019). If negative current events are consistently overloaded on a student's feed, by the time they reach the discussion, they are intellectually exhausted.
The replacement of learning with productivity has made schoolwork and school-based discussions feel more like a survival instinct than a genuine willingness to learn. Without an actionable plan to mitigate this problem, the dynamism of the seminar table will begin to dwindle. There is still time to bring back leisure within scholarly activities, to rebuild an environment where students rediscover the joy within genuine curiosity.
Works Cited
Havrylets, Y. (2019). Impact of TV news on Psycho-Physiological state depending on emotional burnout. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Impact-of-TV-News-on-Psycho-Physiological-Sta