Learning to Grapple with the World

By: Johann Neem

Johann Neem is author of What’s the Point of College? and Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. He is Professor of History at Western Washington University.

It is a difficult time to be a college professor, just as it is to be a student. For various complicated reasons, students are coming to campus less prepared and less willing to engage in the kind of work—reading and writing particularly—that has long been required to become college-educated. Moreover, thanks to generative AI, students can now produce workable papers without doing any of the thinking once required. This means that students are neither capable nor needing to engage deeply with subject matter. They can avoid being educated and still get a degree.

This of course does not describe all students. Many are intellectually curious and honest. Yet the pressure to perform well in courses and the influence of a student culture that is often anti-intellectual and accepts cheating shapes the experiences of all students, and professors too, at elite no less than ordinary institutions. From policy makers to parents, students too often hear that the purpose of their college education is job training. Even if they do not choose a vocational major, they are told that their degree is more important than the journey that led to it.

But, of course, for liberal education, it is the journey that counts. Indeed, what matters most are not the outcomes—the graded assignments, the credit hours, the degree—but whether students develop their capacity and desire to be thinkers. Learning to think deeply about the world is not easy. As I argue in my book What’s the Point of College?, thinking deeply requires subject matter knowledge, disciplinary and interdisciplinary skills, and intellectual virtues such as curiosity. A good college education does not just certify that students have completed a certain number of assignments at a passable level. It should transform students’ capabilities and desire to engage with the human and natural worlds. In other words, a good college education is about character formation. It cultivates our innate desire to use our minds and helps us learn to use our minds well.

Today, students do not get enough time to grapple meaningfully with subject matter, and thus to develop the knowledge, skills, and virtues that ought to define a good college education. Part of the reason is that years of high-stakes testing have forced high-school teachers to focus on skills—especially on reading and math—at the expense of literature, history and social studies, and science. High school students are assigned excerpts to read instrumentally to do well on standardized assessments instead of being asked to delve deeply into material, embrace ambiguity, and cultivate the imagination.

“The American School” by Matthew Pratt (1765) depicts the studio of British-American painter Benjamin West (far left). The canvas models the master-apprentice and workshop-intensive setting of art education in the eighteenth century. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Grappling requires something different than getting the right answer. Whether in the sciences or the humanities, it means working through complex problems collectively. That requires class time, one of professors’ scarcest resources. However, if professors are to help students learn to love learning, they need to slow down and create time and space in their class for students to simply work through things. It sounds so simple, but it is not. Too often, students come to class underprepared and unwilling to work or engage. It is so much easier for a professor to fill the time with lecturing or with a lot of activities. Or to give up reaching most students and just teach to those who are prepared and willing.

Grappling requires the virtue of epistemic humility on the part of students and professors. By this I mean that scholars must understand the limits of their knowledge and recognize that various perspectives have merit. What we think is always contingent on learning more. We must remain open. As professors, we should introduce students to diverse viewpoints and interpretations within our fields and help students understand them. Professors have a difficult task here. On the one hand, compared with our students, we know more, and it is our duty as teachers to take seriously the responsibility that comes with expertise. Epistemic humility does not require deferring to students’ opinions or prior knowledge. Yet it does require recognizing that our students can and often do bring up ideas and insights that are profound and that we too can learn from them. Professors can demonstrate to students how to be humble and take diversity seriously by treating respectfully all serious ideas and competing viewpoints within our fields and among our students.

Still, at the end of the day, professors need to convince students to do the work. If many students don’t want to do the work, it is in part, I’d wager, because they have not had the chance to realize how joyful that work can be. We have minds and using them is part of what makes us flourish as humans. Maybe students missed the joy because they were forced online during the pandemic. Or maybe it’s because so many of their classes focused on mastering standardized assessments over deeper forms of learning. Or maybe it’s because some progressive educators, increasingly mindful of inequality, have not been willing to hold students to high standards. Whatever the cause, there are ways to respond.

In class, we professors need to slow down. We need to do more of the real stuff in class if we are to convince students to do more of it out of class. This is not just to build skills, but to cultivate a love of subjects that we have devoted our lives to studying. We know it’s fascinating; they do not. Slowing down is also necessary to push back on the evasions to thought made possible by generative AI. If students can avoid thinking outside of class, it is imperative that they be asked—indeed forced—to think in class. Discussions, questions, in-class reading and writing, must complement, and even in some cases replace, the work students have done out of class. Students who never experience the joy of grappling, getting lost, and then discovering that they have a new purchase on the world will never choose to do the hard work of getting educated.

Ultimately, colleges are not that different from churches—they are seeking to form character through rituals and practices. That is why a good college education takes time, requires community, and cannot be achieved either by being rushed or pursued online. Colleges must remove people from the busy-ness of their lives so they have space and time to develop what L. M. Sacasas, in this Raised Hand series, calls “the art of attention.” It is difficult to convert a person to the higher goods that colleges exist to nurture; it is even more difficult to make seeking those goods a permanent part of a person’s makeup.

Grappling requires culture change. Colleges undermine their mission when they offer degrees online or when they provide students ways to bypass a liberal arts education through vocational majors. Colleges too often emphasize the external benefits of a college education: higher salaries, greater opportunity, career advancement. Those things might happen, but they are secondary. What really matters is that students come to love knowledge and commit themselves to speaking truthfully. College graduates should not just have general cultural and scientific literacy. They should see their education as preparing them to be better citizens as well as members of the workforce. They should consider their minds as worthy of improvement on their own terms. They should read, listen to podcasts and documentaries, go to the theater. In short, they should become lifelong learners who continuously build on the foundation their college education has laid. College should be the beginning, not the end, of their education.

The Raised Hand is a project of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and serves its mission to catalyze and empower thoughtful Christian presence and practice at colleges and universities around the world, in service of the common good. To learn more visit cscmovement.org.