Student-Centered Education

There is a very disturbing trend in schools today, from elementary school up through the universities. I have experienced it, my friends who are teachers have experienced it, and my wife has experienced it. It is this phenomenon of administrators assuming that whatever students say is the unvarnished truth, meaning the presumption of innocence is with the student and the presumption of guilt is on the teacher. And it seems that nothing the teacher says is believed or listened to in the least. No, the students are always right and pure and good; the teacher is always in the wrong and out to get the student and never doing anything right. Unless you are giving away A's without demanding the students do any work -- and absolutely do not criticize the students' work at all! No, we can't have that -- it might bruise their delicate egos.

What this is doing is undermining all respect for authority. The students learn that all they have to do to get anything they want is complain. They learn that those above the teacher will always go against the teacher, meaning the students end up not respecting the teacher's authorty. And why should they? The teacher doesn't have any authority. Neither do those who automatically give in.

The excuse is that they want to be more "student-centered." Well, what have schools been all this time? What they mean is they want the schools to be student-run and student-controlled. This is and has been a recipe for disaster. Students don't know what they need to know -- thus, they have no business being consulted on it. Being student-centered does not mean they get to decide anything regarding the way the class is structured, how the teacher teaches, what the assignments are or when or how often they are assigned. It does not mean anyone gets treated differently due to circumstances. It does not mean you give in to their whining. It does not mean you even put up with their whining. It especially does not mean you refrain from criticizing -- or, dare I say, even shaming -- the student. If you cannot correct a student, you cannot teach that student. Nowadays many students turn in work so bad that they need to be shamed, even embarrassed, at what they turned it. Especially when you have so many trying to get their papers done literally in the hour before class, when they had over a week to do the paper. Sometimes longer. With many college students, the writing is so bad that, to be honest, they should go back to their high schools and sue them for having let them pass when they could not write.

There is a reason discipline and disciple contain the same root: you cannot be a good student without discipline. Further, to learn, you have to have a teacher, a master who help you master what you need to know. But without authority, a teacher cannot teach. And so long as administrators give in to students (and parents), teachers will cease to have authority, meaning they will cease being teachers.