A Belated Response To: College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.

A Facebook friend posted a link to this NY Times Magazine piece by Professor Stephen L. Carter along with some kudos about how the piece captured the poster's views of what college should be about.  In days of yore I would have read much of the Times Magazine already, but recently I find I read much less of the paper, doing word games instead, reading fiction (most recently a Raymond Chandler novel), or simply goofing off.  Some of this is that recently I often feel I'm not learning from what I'm reading.  Another part is that the reading seems a source of stress that I would be better off to avoid.  In this case I started to read the piece, found I disagreed with the author on fundamental points, and then stopped reading.  But I wanted to share my contrary views.  They have appeared in this blog over the years and in other than the present context.  It's not just a knee-jerk reaction now.  So, yesterday morning I finished reading the piece and after that I began writing this response to illustrate my thinking on these matters.  In doing so, I will make heavy use of earlier posts I've made.  If the reader is so inclined, those can be read as well, and in this way I can keep the current post to modest length. 

Here are the criticisms in a nutshell:

The piece is far too idealistic in its conception.  It needs a more realistic sense of the student/learner and about the source of learning blockages.

No doubt, Professor Carter was a precocious learner as a student.  I believe I was a precocious learner as well.  Such learners will have a well-honed curiosity before they enter college.  They likely will have an intellectual social life, fed by extensive non-school reading and other activities that challenge them.  I've written about this in a post called PLAs Please (a play on words explained in the piece).  Nowadays, long-form reading is on the downs as is face-to-face conversation, a consequence of the "progress" brought to us by online technology. College for precocious learners is giving these students what they already want.  But by no means are these students the majority of those in college.  What about educating the others?

There is another dimension to this issue often described as students lacking a sense of agency.  Hanna Rosin's piece in the Atlantic, The Overprotected Kid, gives a good first pass as to the primary cause.  Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz, explains how this lack of agency manifests in college.  The last semester I taught, fall 2019, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed were filled with stories about student mental health problems.  But then the focus was on the lack of mental health professionals on campus, not on how learning is structured.  The problem persisted through Covid and may have gotten even worse then.  Are students who lack agency nevertheless able to express their curiosity?  

Professor Carter doesn't talk at all about fear and how fear can inhibit learning.  Here I want to focus only on one sort of fear, the fear of looking stupid in public, in front of an authority figure such as the instructor or in front of one's classmates.

Even if questions and comments are welcomed by the instructor and that is evident to the students, it is quite likely that most students (I'm using the classes I've taught since retirement as my sample) won't ever raise their hands to participate.  For those who attend class regularly, how does one explain this?  I want to note that in the mid to late 1990s when I was leading the SCALE project on campus that introduced some online learning into the face-to-face classroom, many of the instructors we interviewed at the time told us that they were trying out online to help address the "shy student problem."  The issue has been with us for some time. Free speech de jure does not mean free speech de facto.  

This issue about the learner's fears inhibiting learning surely means that the idealistic approach misses the boat on the gains from hearing diverse opinions on a matter.  I wrote about this in a post called, On learning to argue with people where we disagree - what's possible and what isn't.  The safety needs that the learner has must be accounted for properly as a precondition.  This point is very much like what Maslow argues, that the Being Needs and Self-Actualization are in dialectic with each other.  In contrast, the idealistic approach of Professor Carter focuses solely on Self-Actualization and ignores the Being Needs entirely.  Now, I would claim that the fear of looking stupid is universal, while the fear a black student has in a classroom of predominantly white students is not.  Perhaps the non-universal fears have commanded too much attention.  But ignoring the universal fears is not the right answer.

There is then what might seem a pedantic point, but since such a big deal is being made of Free Speech,  the classroom isn't the place for it.  Office hours might be, but so few students nowadays attend office hours.

I wrote about this in a post called, There really isn't freedom of speech in a well functioning classroom.  The classroom presents an asymmetric situation where the instructor has authority. Hence, the instructor regulates student speech. Students expect this.  This isn't a big deal, until somebody tries to politicize the fact.

Provincialism (or closed-mindedness if you prefer that expression) persists, on campus and throughout society.  Given that, how should an effective classroom manage the situation?

I wrote about this in a post called Provincialism and Freedom of Speech in the Classroom.  I want to link this idea to something else I learned from the book What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain.  Once the learner has a well-established world view, if the learner then confronts evidence that challenges this view, the learner is apt to reject the evidence rather than to adjust the world view to account for the evidence.  This itself might be a kind of self-protection.  You might call it anti-curiosity.  My understanding is that it can be overcome only very slowly and needs a lot of patience with the learner.  

This might give one reason why so many students seem to want to get through their courses (with high grades, of course) without being fundamentally changed in their intellectual outlook from taking those courses.  Further, it is my belief that the approach feeds the mindset of students where they are less sensitive than they otherwise might be to the needs of their fellow students.  Such sensitivity, were it the norm, might obviate the need for regulation from on high in this dimension.

I would add that this feeds the apparent mercenary tendencies of so many students, which Professor Carter briefly rails about, but then moves on.  I'm afraid there are real economic forces at play - largely the income inequality in society at large and the high tuition at elite universities that mean those mercenary tendencies will persist for later generations of college students unless these fundamentals are reversed.  

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I could raise other related points, but let me close here.  I think I've made enough of a case for my main bone of contention.  The purely idealistic view of college, it's purpose and how it should go about achieving that purpose, does a disservice by abstracting from some real needs that have to be addressed for any reform to be successful.  As a former professor, I know that I would often cast myself as the typical learner in my classroom. In retrospect, that was an error on my part.  We know our own experiences and thus seemingly can base our teaching approach on those experiences.  But the vast majority of our students won't go on to become professors.    It behooves us to better understand the experiences of our students to frame our teaching so as to account for their experiences.  How can we really reach them so they learn and not just in a surface way?