MAYBE it’s just me since I am getting older and, in an industry, where you, the educator, gets older, your annual crop of students in every intake stays within the same age group.

But no, even my younger colleagues and also friends and acquaintances from the industry also share the same level of flabbergastedness.

This flabbergastedness, as I have observed, tends to revolve around the much-discussed issue of the soft skills that most successive graduates tend to increasingly lack.

What most don’t realize is that they already lack these upon entering university.

Here’s what I believe are at the root of this rot in the middle-class.

1) The smartphone

When I first began teaching about 21 years ago, I began with using transparency slides with a projector and the whiteboard marker was your best friend.

Students diligently wrote down what was written on the slides or the whiteboard and we also had to photocopy readings and notes and hand them to students who would also diligently keep them.

Fast forward to the present, students now just tend to stare at the lecturer and at best maybe take photos of the presentation slide – now on PowerPoint or the like – on a screen. Spotting students who actually take notes – physically with a pen and paper notebook – is becoming increasingly rare like spotting a Bigfoot.

We now are also expected to upload our lecture slides, readings and other subject related documents on an online platform like eLearn or some cloud service.

Even attendance is taken using an app now – something I am not fond of and still do comply with. I prefer to read them off the class list and do a roll call because this practice allows me to know my students’ names and faces – but I am lucky because I teach a small number of students per class and I am very aware that these attendance apps are a godsend to those who teach bigger numbers.

The smartphone is the portal into social media – nobody logs on via a computer anymore. Just as a physical device, it enables students to be disengaged from the present and along the way lose some real-time social skills – those precious “soft skills” that we all gripe about.

While everything can be expressed in emoji and memes, educators need to level up in reigniting “old skills” like reading and writing in real-time and in class.

The smartphone will remain present in our lives and no one has any real solutions in regard to it being a distraction device in higher education.

2) The broken family unit

A pattern that I picked up when I was heading the degree programme at my faculty: I had to deal with all sorts of student-based issues from poor academic performance to absenteeism to disciplinary issues. 

It was a correlation between a single-parent middle-class family and the tendency of a student to go off the rails.

Aside from divorce rates rising – the gender roles of men and women has also made the household richer on paper – this also means that the child sees less of both parents. In a household of one parent, this becomes more critical.

Having one parent in the household to carry the load of raising children is undoubtedly a challenge but I began to realise the importance of having a parent merely present in a child’s life – even at college or university-level – remains paramount, especially with the first point I brought up about the smartphone.

With the sole middle-class parent most probably working long-hours to make ends meet, the child is often “subcontracted” to either the surviving grandparent or a relative.

Kids don’t hang out physically at video game arcades or curb sides or even mamaks much anymore – they are online and this virtuality becomes the substitute for company.

The economics of things (private higher education is also getting ridiculously expensive as the years go by) is what is keeping the sole parent away in terms of presence at times and practising this mindfulness is critical.

One initially learns through mimicry and absence too can be mimicked. At worst, it becomes normalised.

As we modernise as a society, we’ve also substituted rites-of-passage rituals into adulthood for the pursuit of higher education, especially if you are from an urban middle-class family.

Most middle-class students often, from what I have gathered, are rushed into college and higher education without really knowing what they really want out of life yet.

And some middle-class parents also tend to forget that universities are not daycare centres for their children: education begins at home.

Yet, I don’t see this dialogue happening still between stakeholders. It only arises during crises, often with some sleek public relations involved.

This is where the reality of university rankings and the reality of higher education on the ground do not match. – July 19, 2024.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.