Why Didn’t You Teach Me Excel?

The skills you will never be taught in academia, but will always be expected to know.

In the first semester of my undergraduate degree, I had a group project for one of my lab courses. We were asked to read research papers on a given topic, come up with a hypothesis and execute experiments to test the hypothesis. The requirements for the project were routine: statistical analysis of the data, a written report and a class presentation summarizing the main findings. If you are familiar with MS Excel, Word and PowerPoint, this shouldn’t be very hard. After all, these are basic skills a first year college student should know, and you don’t need to be taught these skills.

Except that you do need to be taught these skills. The students that enter college ready with these skills aren’t particularly smarter; they are usually ones who by virtue of their socio-economic (read: caste and class) privileges have been taught those skills earlier in life. This learning happened either directly in well-resourced schools, or indirectly, like by being in a household with a computer or having a parent that worked a white collar job who showed you how to use a laptop. Computer literacy is just one of many skills that are perceived as basic and hence never receive attention from those who teach. Email etiquette, public speaking, reading comprehension – all skills that can be learned through dedicated instruction – are marked as ‘things everyone should intrinsically know’. They form the foundation of daily activities in education and academia, but are alien to those who may have grown up outside such a system. 

For all students, college marks a transition. In school (and this is especially true for Indian schools), a teacher delivered learning material and students were expected to memorize content from a textbook and reproduce it in some format in an examination. In contrast, in higher education, students are asked to showcase learning in new ways- delivering presentations, writing reports, performing literature reviews, but ironically, while they are taught about the subject matter for these assignments, they are rarely taught how to accomplish these tasks. The label of basic skills allows institutions to wash their hands of their responsibility to train students, and turns an institutional failure to teach into a problem of individual learning.

I caught onto this phenomenon fairly early on in college, but believed Hanlon’s razor to hold true in this case: never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. I reasoned that perhaps educational institutions simply didn’t know that students coming from marginalized backgrounds may not have experience  with some of these skills. However, the more I read the work of Dalit and other minority scholars, I understand that this isn’t a bug; it's a feature. It is one of the many ways institutions implement gatekeeping of marginalized students. The lack of training is reframed as a lack of ability, and used to justify exclusion from opportunities. In his article Teaching Like a Savarna, Ravikant Kisana explains: “For most Savarna faculty, like their Savarna students, if you do not know “basic” things like this then it could only mean that you are without merit or simply “too far behind” to ever catch up. Many do not consider training the students in these unfamiliar styles or incentivizing cooperation rather than competition for grades with students who understand these formats.” A toxic narrative of a ‘lack of merit’ is generated, further cemented by comments from professors and classmates who chide the absence of these skills, instead of providing support and encouragement to learn.

I’m a research student, so I spend a good chunk of my time reading research papers. I’ve never formally been taught how to read a research paper, how to conduct a literature review, how to write a report, or how to give an engaging talk. These are the bread and butter of academia, but funnily enough, are never taught. Everything I know about these subjects is from extra classes and workshops I attended, advice from Twitter threads or personal interactions. Students are expected to learn these skills themselves, but the resources for learning are not equitably distributed. Information is deliberately locked away in obscure and inaccessible sources that you are more likely to obtain only if you have social, cultural and literal capital. 

We are, and will continue to do a huge disservice to our students by ignoring the fact that these essential skills are in fact, teachable skills. Taking time to train students early on gives them the tools they need to succeed later in their careers and can level the playing field to a certain degree. But this would require us to reimagine education and the responsibilities of educators. As much as I am generally an optimist, I know institutions suffer from great inertia when pushed for change. In the interim, all I can offer is some advice that is nicely captured by this quote by Mark Twain, “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.”