A confused and less-than-optimal relationship exists between the faculty and students. This bizarre and misunderstood relationship, a problem systemic to our College for "undergraduate education," informs the ugly tension around the Education Department.
Previous commentators and department sympathizers see the turmoil as symptomatic of other ills: a "research-trumps-teaching"--minded administration; a strangely polemical dean of social sciences; a corps of anti-pre-professionals posturing against teacher training and certification; and a coterie of hard-core liberal artists, for whom "ed" classes teach topics already handled well in other departments but without the guaranteed dumbed-down syllabus and easy A. These four woes may simply be side-effects of a greater complication, an anti-dialogue plaguing the Department and our liberal arts college.
The faculty and the students own the College. Grant that the Trustees have stewardship over the institution, the administration provides operational assistance, the alumni provide financial backing, and the public may feel due the graduation of appropriately productive, civic-minded youth. But the faculty provides the substance of the school, fulfilling the College's mission: to teach the students and to add to the public discussion of ideas. The students explain the existence of the school: they are the ones who quit the cave to see the light. This joint ownership of and responsibility for the College demands more than benign neglect between its partners. It demands more than formal communion at the podium. College does not exist to provide classrooms in which the "faculty" acts to "instruct" the "student body," so that "learning" ensues. Rather, the faculty and students exist already, and the College provides a convenient place for mutual instruction and learning. At a college, the faculty and the students work in tandem -- and this working includes deciding why the faculty and students came together in the first place.
Students get terribly offended when those in charge privilege "research" (e.g., in the "Psychology and Brain Science of Education," or the "Economics of Education") over focusing on them. Students attend Dartmouth to be taught. Students are selfish -- they must recognize teachers wish to learn too, add to international discussions, turn research into a teaching aid -- but they feel their money and time justifies this selfishness. More, though, they wish to have an understanding between the faculty and themselves about what the research is good for. If, as candidates for an Education Department position have said, teachers would bring students into their laboratories, and use the experiments in relevant ways to the material on discussion, then research fulfills its mission. If students can help contribute original findings, in parallel or with the guidance of their professors, then research works. But when research becomes a separate thing, as a reason to receive grant money or tenure, or because strains of it ("quantitative" rather than "qualitative") are fashionable, then students get hurt. When the dean of the social sciences and some of his colleagues, as many anecdotes affirm, belittle the contributions of the Education Department, faculty-student relations become increasingly fractious. One group ought to respect what another group wishes to learn, within initially agreed-upon parameters. Engineering and Computer Science should be included in the liberal arts, some say--if this is true, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, then we should give just as many resources and good wishes to these departments. Likewise Education.
It is true that, sometimes to great consternation, teachers know more than their students. Whatever this opaque knowledge be (in the teacher's particular discipline, in US history, in academic politics, in human nature), students strive to see it. The professor works to make her knowledge less opaque, more transparent. A faculty-only search committee, whatever its precedence, makes important decision-making hidden to students. Students see this as hiding knowledge from them -- a heresy as great as the mystery in books like The Name of the Rose. The free dissemination of knowledge and understanding and wisdom -- the driving principle of the College -- cannot fail to hold in matters of great importance. There is no chaste "pursuit of knowledge for its own sake." Education serves to better the community, the self, and our understanding of who we are and who am I. This idealism is why we have the College, and why teacher certification seems right. Students respect teachers more than they will admit. For their teachers to discount a Dartmouth-based teacher training offends -- rightfully -- those in the teacher-certification program, and perplexes -- dumbfounds -- all others. How many bon mots of "teaching is the best kind of learning" does anyone need to hear?
To listen allows one to change. Listening, though, requires speaking. What good are secrets when we all work to liberate each other? The best teachers, and the best students, are the best because they facilitate discussion, and free their peers from ancient ignorance and misunderstanding.
