And by natural extension, teachers attempt to expand their students' stock of reality.
At convocation yesterday, Andrew Forsthoefel told our new students that he'd expanded his own stock of reality when he set out on his trans-American walk and listened to the stories of scores of Americans. In the process he learned a great deal about who he was. He grew up.
A university education can be a virtual walk across the best that has been thought, said, and written. It can help students learn who they are. It can help them grow up, in Andrew's sense of discovering what most matters to them and how they can make the most of this improbable, wondrous opportunity called living. It can help them grow up in Immanuel Kant's sense of throwing off self-imposed immaturity and dependence on the ideas and decisions of others. It can help them learn to think for themselves and take responsibility for their lives.
It can't do that, however, Edmundson says, if teachers aren't willing to challenge students and students aren't willing to be challenged. It can't do it if schools adopt the consumer model of education and think of students as customers to be kept satisfied. Real learning is a process of shucking a lot of false self-satisfaction and complacency. It should be an adventure, it will often be exhilarating, but if it works it will bring both the satisfactions and the pains of growth."For a student to be educated, she has to face brilliant antagonists: She has to encounter thinkers who see the world in different terms than she does." Indeed. I'll be happy to introduce her to some.
I'll tell all my new students that. Maybe not on Opening Day, though.
(Andrew begins speaking at about 38")
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