Take assessment, for example. Students find exams stressful, so we are told to reduce the number of exams. Neither do students like to read, so we are told to assign easier and shorter readings. Students find it hard to concentrate, so we are told to break down lectures into small chunks and intersperse activities in between. Students enjoy media content and are happy to engage with YouTube and social media, so we are told to incorporate more videos and make course material and assessments more creative and interactive. Some students don’t like to speak in class, so we are told to make sure there are myriad ways students can participate without having to actually speak.

Such well-meaning educational initiatives — alongside grade inflation, flexible deadlines, warm language in feedback — deny students access to the type of educational experience that universities were designed for. They short-change students by appealing to their immediate wants and feelings rather than their potential for greatness, their capacity for reason, and their fundamental need to leave university better than when they arrived. The student-centered mindset has led to a dumbing-down of curricula and a constant pressure on educators to motivate students, rather than a pressure on students to take ownership of their own success and failure. This is because it appears mostly to have been adopted without a principled questioning of what a university education is for.

The result is that student-centered education leaves undergraduates in a state of constant busyness but also constant worry about the value of these low-stakes endeavors. Students complete more and more simple and straightforward tasks — worksheets, projects, quizzes and so on — without the opportunity to think about what they are doing or learning. It is no wonder they lack motivation: they are denied the life-affirming pride that derives from achieving something genuinely meaningful and built on hard work. And without critical feedback on the work they do undertake, students are not given the necessary guidance they need to improve. In this sense, meeting students where they are keeps them where they are.

A transformative educational experience is supposed to be the point of a university education. Students deserve opportunities for challenge so that they develop the necessary strength of mind and character to meet the myriad challenges they will inevitably face in the higher-stakes contexts of post-university life. Such strengths will also equip them potentially to rise above their personal and social circumstances and pursue the life they want.

Rebekah Wanic and Nina Powell, “The Problem with Student-Centered Education“

I think Wanic and Powell are spot on.

I try to be as reasonable as possible, as clear as possible, as kind as possible, as helpful as possible, as understanding as possible, and as challenging as possible. I am a co-learner in kingdom living, but I’m also experienced and knowledgeable to the degree and in the domains I have been equipped as a disciple of Jesus. I do have authority, but it is rooted in Christ’s authority, to whom all authority belongs.

I also keep in mind that as an instructor in a seminary, I am accountable to Christ, I am not alone in the classroom, Jesus is my Teacher, the Spirit is my advocate and helper, students are my neighbors, brothers, sisters, co-laborers, and partners in the gospel, and that outcomes ultimately belong to God.

I’m still learning how to do my job with excellence. Teaching isn’t easy. Higher education is facing a number of challenges, and having a sound philosophy is but one. Wanic and Powell are right to assert that universities should provide transformational educational experiences. That is my goal as a Christian educator. And I think I can help to create an environment where such experiences can be had up to a point. Threaded throughout, however, there is divine mystery and divine action. Christian education, formation, and the results are ultimately in God’s hands. That’s why teaching, I believe, is an exercise in faith.

Safetyism is the cult of safety–an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to see themselves as victims.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

There is a difference between throwing someone a life preserver when they are in danger of drowning and barring them from getting into the pool at all, or in only allowing the pool to be so shallow as to not enjoy the freedom and thrill that comes from entering the deep. Without sufficient depth, we never learn how to swim.

Lukianoff and Haidt identify three bad ideas that prevail on too many university campuses: the untruth of fragility (what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker), the untruth of emotional reasoning (always trust your feelings), and the untruth of us versus them: (life is a battle between good people and evil people).

As a solution, they argue for the elevation of wisdom.

Unpleasant experiences and exposure to discomfort can result in growth and maturity. While our emotions are part of our humanity, alone, they are insufficient for sound judgment. And while there are good ideas and bad ideas, righteousness and wickedness, and there are arguments worth having, it isn’t always easy to make such neat divisions. The Christian doctrinal commitment to human sinfulness and God’s position as rightful judge simultaneously humbles us when we do make arguments and chastens us in the knowledge that our judgments may be in error.

Lukianoff and Haidt wrote their book to address a deficit in our intellectual discourse as it unfolds on university campuses, and then, by extension, in the culture. It’s a great book. It not only contains insight for the classroom, but also for how we think about public debate. All of us would benefit from sharpening our ability to reason, to listen, to learn how to make compelling and persuasive arguments, and to make those arguments in a way that acknowledges reality as it is: a real mess.

This book has another benefit: it exposes flaws in the way we have come to measure reality, and challenges us to instead seek to become people of wisdom. The first step to move beyond a problem is to admit that you have one and to accurately define it. The second is to chart a path forward. The third is to walk the path.

The conservative critique of American higher education is well known to Journal readers: The universities are run by intolerant progressives. The left counters with an insult: The lack of intellectually respectable conservative arguments is responsible for campus political uniformity. Perhaps a better starting point in this debate is the students, most of whom actually want freer discourse on campus. They want to be challenged by views they don’t hold.

[. . .]

True engagement, though, requires honesty. In an anonymous survey of my 110 students this spring, 68% told me they self-censor on certain political topics even around good friends. That includes self-described conservative students, but also half of the liberals. “As a Duke student, it is difficult to be both a liberal and a Zionist,” one wrote. Another remarked, “Although I support most BLM ideas, I do not feel that I can have any conversation that even slightly criticizes the movement.”

To get students to stop self-censoring, a few agreed-on classroom principles are necessary. On the first day, I tell students that no one will be canceled, meaning no social or professional penalties for students resulting from things they say inside the class. If you believe in policing your fellow students, I say, you’re in the wrong room. I insist that goodwill should always be assumed, and that all opinions can be voiced, provided they are offered in the spirit of humility and charity. I give students a chance to talk about the fact that they can no longer talk. I let them share their anxieties about being socially or professionally penalized for dissenting. What students discover is that they are not alone in their misgivings.

John Rose, associate director of the Arete Initiative at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, writing in The Wall Street Journal, “How I Liberated My College Classroom“

Rose set ground rules and then helped his students stick to their agreements. After observing over three hundred students engage civilly and honestly on a range of complex and emotionally loaded topics, his conclusion is that they have flourished. Rose writes:

On the last day of class this term, several of my students thanked their counterparts for the gift of civil disagreement. Students told me of unlikely new friendships made. Some existing friendships, previously strained by political differences, were mended. All of this should give hope to those worried that polarization has made dialogue impossible in the classroom. Not only is it possible, it’s what students pine for.

Rose’s class enters the fray on political topics. These same dispositions and postures, however, prohibit the free flow and exchange of ideas in the theology classroom. Institutionally, we are a confessional body. We have doctrinal commitments and agreed upon ideals that define our community life. But as a Baptist institution, we believe in religious freedom and respecting the conscience and conviction of the individual. Some of our students are still working out what they believe. There are differences of opinion. Some perspectives are shaded by the debates of the moment, current events, or popular ideas in the culture. But being honest about those differences can be tough.

You’d think a Christian community would be uniquely equipped to navigate these differences. A commitment to truth, humility, seeking unity together in Christ, confidence in the Spirit, love of neighbor…I could go on. Virtues must be practiced. When we assume everyone is of the same heart and mind, it can take courage to bring other opinions into the open. When we believe we represent a divergent viewpoint–whether that viewpoint is liberal or conservative–we fear being marginalized and rejected, labeled a false teacher, or rejected outright.

I’m going to keep this Rose essay in mind this year.

There are insights I may apply. As I engage with students, I try to demonstrate the ways in which I do my own homework, even going so far as to try and explain the position that differs from my own, even while disclosing that I do not agree with that position. I also try to call attention to the moral and ethical commitments the Christian community shares, and to point to the Scriptures and the wisdom they contain for disagreeing with one another, both in how we can engage with one another constructively, and when it may be necessary for our disagreements to be sharp.