The Importance of Student-Led Discussions in a Post-Truth Age
It has been a fun week, despite the messy weather. On Tuesday afternoon, the students eeked out a narrow victory against the faculty and staff in a spirited basketball extravaganza, complete with a halftime show! Tonight many students will stay on campus for the semiformal dance. And with spring break around the corner, spirits are high.
I visited two history classes earlier this week and, in both, observed students speaking much more than their teachers. Juniors in American history were discussing our country’s overseas entanglements and imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Ninth graders were discussing the Etruscans, Greeks, and Phoenicians and contrasting the historical record of those civilizations with the contemporary Roman accounts. Active, student-led discussions have long been a hallmark of what we do, particularly in the humanities. Teachers, as the experts in the room, frame up interesting questions and periodically enter the conversation to offer a perspective that the students may be missing. Of course they do and they should; we have deeply knowledgeable teachers who can draw connections our students can’t and inspire these young people around the table. But it is largely up to the students to test their ideas against their classmates and assess the strength of their peers’ arguments.
This approach has never been more important. Consider the sheer number of opinions and (sometimes false) narratives our students encounter every day on television and social media. The days of Walter Cronkite as the grandfatherly and neutral arbiter of what is important and true are long past. It is up to all of us to make those determinations for ourselves, and this will be even more true in the years to come. I’m proud of our teachers for doing their part to prepare students for that future.