Cultural currents intertwined to fire Maitland Jones, Jr.

Therapeutic, student-centered learning and placating authority help lower the bar for education

Photo by Sides Imagery, courtesy of Pexels

Maitland Jones Jr., a chemistry professor, was recently dismissed from his position at NYU. Some of his students claimed that his organic chemistry course was too difficult, blaming him for their low test scores and diminishing chance of getting into medical school. As seems to be the fashion these days, they petitioned against him and got their way. The administration folded under the students' demands, and Jones, a renowned scholar, lost his job.

This situation, and the many others like it, begs the question: What causes students, and administrators, at universities to react in such a way? Is it coddling and therapeutic culture? The denial of human nature? Entitlement? The desire to be admired? Abandonment of excellence, and the soft bigotry of low expectations? Or the changing purpose of an education? 

I suspect it's all of the above wrapped up in one deceptively neat, but ultimately destructive bow. 

From a young age, students are told that they can be and achieve anything they want, if they just set their mind to it. They can grow up to have careers as astronauts, doctors, teachers, computer programmers, you name it. All they need to do is work hard and show some grit. Ability almost never plays into the equation. What if a child does not excel in the subject area necessary to enter a given career? Then what? Apparently, rather than learning and then accepting the limits to their abilities, students rally against high standards, pressuring instructors to lower the bar. Never mind that the limits to their ability will likely later interfere with obtaining the career they desire or excelling if they do manage to enter their sought after field. But by then, having expended a great amount of resources preparing to work in that profession, the transition to a new career will be costly. Instead of worrying about dashing a students hopes and dreams, and placating to their every ambition, administrators and instructors would show more kindness by telling them early on: "This might not be the best path for you."

When I taught undergraduate students, I inevitably had a handful of students who would ask for deadline extensions due to mental health issues, or students who would turn in assignments late and then provide a mental health excuse for why their assignments were late. Many of these students aspired to become K-12 classroom teachers. I didn't question whether students were really struggling mentally with juggling their course load, among other things; I assumed that they were being honest. But I wanted to say to these students: "teaching is a stressful job with unmovable deadlines coming at you every day. If you are unable to handle the stress of being a college student, maybe you aren't cut out to be a teacher." But I was not permitted to say such a thing, because the student might actually drop out of the program and change their major, or because I would ruin their life, as one administrator put it. The message was clear: I was to give students the extension they desired and make the accommodations necessary for them to succeed. I was to support students like a therapist, not push them to excel like a teacher would.

When situations like mine and Jones' arise, I lament the lack of leadership—the inability of administrators and instructors to say, no, I am not firing a teacher because you don't like the grade you earned, or, no, I am not changing policy or expectations to fit your comfort level. But maybe the problem isn't strictly a lack of leadership, but the eagerness or need among authority figures to be liked. This might be a case of people accessing careers that they are not fit to occupy—strong leadership is not a natural ability of all—or the problem might be generational, as Rob Henderson argues. 

Henderson observes that the older generation (primarily the Baby Boomers) wants too desperately to be seen as younger than they are, a change from previous generations who wanted to be viewed as older and wiser, which leads them to cater to the young. Essentially, he argues, they care too much about what younger people think of them. Many older adults, including those in positions of authority, don't want to be the downers that tell young people they can't have or do something, because they rebelled against those types of figures in their youth. Administrators might be too sympathetic to the so-called plight of young people to exercise their authority.

Jeremy Adams tangentially ties the problem of diminishing authority to therapeutic culture. In the past, the purpose of education, Adams argues, was to shape and ripen a young person's inner nature, but now educators are expected to soften the outer world to make it as simple and pleasant as possible. "The role of a teacher is no longer to inculcate habits and standards that would empower a young person to live successfully in a broken, unfair, and tumultuous world." Instead, he claims, a teacher's role is "largely emotional in nature." In other words, teachers are charged with creating or catering to a universe that has become student-centered. 

Student-centered learning is a pedagogical approach that places the child or young adult at the center of their education—i.e., a student's interests, abilities, and preferred approach to learning are placed first and foremost. The approach makes sense intuitively. Ultimately, the benefit of a good education is bestowed upon the one receiving it. So, why wouldn't a teacher place the needs of individual students as the focal point of their instruction? In many respects, I agree with this approach, but there are drawbacks. First, students don't always know what they need to know. They require access to people with knowledge and experience relevant to their educational endeavors and goals to help them fill gaps in their own knowledge and build experience solving subject-area-specific problems. Second, students, like all humans, prefer an easier path when things get difficult. If the demands of a course become cumbersome, a student may desire and argue for accommodations like deadline extensions or alternative assessments, even if those are less rigorous and won't help them achieve their wanted outcomes. If an administrator or instructor takes seriously all requests to meet students' needs, curricula is dumbed down and rigor decreases. As Rebekah Wanic and Nina Powell have observed about university culture:

"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. [...] 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 an approach, Wanic and Powell argue, short-changes 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." Rather than teachers endlessly accommodating students, students should learn to take ownership of their own success and failure. Otherwise, "they are denied the life-affirming pride that derives from achieving something genuinely meaningful and built on hard work." Low standards may make at-hand tasks easier, but they won't set students on a path to achieve their potential.

Coleman Hughes, during a podcast episode with Ian Rowe, told his own story of the consequences of low educational standards. In elementary school, he attended the local public school, where everything came easy to him, and he needed only exert minimal effort. At the end of his elementary school years, he transferred to a private school where the standards were much higher. Suddenly, he had to put in real effort. The school work was incredibly difficult, and for the first time, he really had to try; he had to expend mental effort on every minute of his homework, for instance, to get a good grade. He had no precedent for what it was like to put in real effort. But after a few months, and a few tears, he made the transition and ascended to the top of his class at his new school. The bar had risen and he rose to meet it, allowing him to tap into his capabilities. A gratifying experience, no doubt.

Certainly, not every child in every subject area will meet the high bar set for them. Not every student will get A's, some will get B's and C's, because, again, everyone has limits to their capabilities. Straight-A honors students in schools with unwavering high expectations are the exception, not the rule. But, importantly, students will not learn their limits, as Freddie deBoer advocates, if the bar is set so low that everyone can not just meet it, but hop over it.

Setting high standards and pushing students towards excellence is a different understanding of what education is for than the modern conception of it. Rather than shaping and ripening a young person's inner nature—their minds—as Adams' advocates, many students, administrators, and educators alike view modern formal education, from kindergarten through college, as a means to earn a certificate and get a job. To be sure, learning is still an element of schooling, but ultimately most students and their parents are interested in the grades that will earn them the degree or certificate needed to enter the field they desire. If the point of education is to get students out the door with the credential necessary to land the job they want, not ensure that they are prepared to make the best use of their education once they graduate, demands heighten for accommodations when students don't receive acceptable grades. The goal of schooling becomes about an economic calculation not an education.

The petition-signers of Jones' chemistry class wanted a smooth path to the career they desired and wouldn't accept that perhaps that path wasn't meant for them. In a world filled with the worst impulses of therapeutic culture and student-centered learning, and a misunderstanding of what education is for, when they hit a roadblock, they complained to the authority and the authority bent to their will. 

The lessons from this situation are endless: Even the best instructors will not always be loved by their students; students aren't always right; young people will have limits to their abilities; and learning new things won't always be easy. Leaders charged with ensuring a high-quality education that helps students learn their capabilities and limits, preparing them to live successfully in a world of high expectations and failure, should acknowledge these truths. Otherwise, they deprive the young people in their care of an education.