most students resist being educated

I'm reviewing a book at the moment, and the author included the by-now boilerplate notion that the internet has made traditional education obsolete: whereas once information was locked away in the brains of teachers, or in ivory towers or expensive encyclopedias or whatever, now, information is free, and thus any student who wants to know things can simply find them online, and so teachers are out of a job. This idea is typically directed against collegiate educators, for multiple reasons, most saliently America's deep hatred of our fantastic higher education system. But the elementary logic is applicable to anyone who teaches. I hear it constantly. It's bullshit, though: it misunderstands the nature of education, and more, the nature of students.

First, education is not and never has been about giving people knowledge. I wonder if the people making this argument have ever heard of a public library. People have always been able to get their hands on information, if they've been willing to do a little work to get it. The internet just makes it a little bit easier. If education were as easy as giving people information, then we would not talk about some such thing as education. We'd have no need to. You should know that when the printing press was on the rise in early modern Europe, there was eerily similar talk of educators being out of business. If you can just put all the knowledge in books, and those books are no longer the property of a powerful caste, what purpose do monks serve? But of course, having a book filled with the world's knowledge, and having that knowledge, are two separate things. I assure you: when I teach freshman composition, I could leave my students alone in the classroom with their textbooks for the whole semester, and they wouldn't come out of it with any more skills or knowledge than they had when they first started. My job is to cram the education into their heads.

I don't exaggerate, and I imply resistance for a reason: most students, in most educational contexts, resist being educated. It's true. It's not just true, but banal and obvious. Why do we have truancy officers? Why do teachers device intricate schemes of punishment and reward? Why do we have Norman Rockwell visions of students playing hooky or sitting in the corner with a dunce cap? Because many students have only the barest desire to learn. That's why people made it illegal for them not to go to school!

When Aaron Swartz died, I read a couple people lamenting that not everyone is self-educated in the way he was, that not everyone could enjoy unstructured, self-directed education like Swartz had. And I just thought to myself, god, what a fantasy. What a silly fantasy. Most people are never, ever going to be autodidacts. If such a thing were likely or even possible, we wouldn't have our endless educational debates. Let me tell you a dirty secret about college students: they mostly want more structure, not less. They are constantly asking for rubrics and models and explicit directions on how to get an A. That's the question: not "how can I do this my own way," but "how can I ensure I get the best possible grade?" I am constantly pushing back against their desire to be told how to do every individual step in every individual assignment. There's no sense in which my teaching or my students or my university are unique, in that. Many of my students are brilliant, but they want to do as little as possible to succeed. You will find that they share this tendency with most people. That's precisely why a self-directed, self-motivated, and intellectually curious student is always so refreshing. I love undergrads and I love teaching, and I'm not trying to damn people here. I'm saying that this is the role of an educator. It's not to unleash information and let students find their own bliss. It isn't, it never has been, and it can't be.

Again, the same complaint from me: our debates about education are filled with so much bullshit fantasy about what most students or all students are like, that there's no room to talk about reality. The orthodoxy in education debates is to talk as if every student is some budding genius who needs only to have their potential unlocked and then to pursue their own bliss. Most students are not like Aaron Swartz and they never will be. Trying to erect an entire educational system based on the habits of the extremely rare individuals at the top of the heap is idiocy.

To be useful in the education debate, you have to imagine your average student, in any level of education, as you do the average person. And very few of us imagine the average person to be a budding genius. This romanticized fantasy about what most students want or can achieve is a direct and serious impediment to making education as good as it can be. What's more, it demonstrates the basic poverty of our national conversation on the topic: so many of the loudest voices have never taught anyone anything at all.