Brad Beachy, Professor of English
In a recent issue of the Butler Lantern, a student writer complains about professors “shoving your political views down our [students’] throats.” It’s true we call what we do here higher education—education is not and should never be indoctrination for the reason that indoctrination seeks to shut critical thinking down while education turns it on.
On the other hand, an instructor who blithely teaches only “the material” with no acknowledgement of the welter of issues and ideas swirling around outside the classroom would likewise fail to stimulate thinking and the connection that thinking has to our world.
This was the chief complaint of college students during the 1960’s and 70’s—even for those who had no interest in the growing counter-culture of the time: the courses must be made relevant to the world we live in. That means, for instance, stop feeding us pablum in economics or poly sci classes that we represent the “free world” when our own government has overthrown democratically elected leaders in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Congo (1960), the Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1973). Stop making us study courses like Greek when we are getting shipped off to an unpopular and unwinnable war, against our will, to die in some jungle hamlet with an unpronounceable name.
How times have changed. Now there’s too much of the real world in our classrooms apparently, and that reality is “negative” and uncomfortable. Our student writer wants the soothing balm of an educated professional telling her that, by golly, she’s right! She didn’t sign up for ideas that will challenge her existing preconceptions.
A college education is not drinking from a stagnant pool of never-changing knowledge—it is swimming for your life in the pounding surf, in a dialogue of a thousand contending voices, each one both demanding of and subject to your scrutiny and analysis.
That’s what higher (as opposed to lower) education is. Anything less, and you should ask for your money back.