"Believing in Yourself" as Classroom Culture

When everyone is right and no one is wrong, what happens to the authority of expertise?

 By Susan Ostrov Weisser

When I was a college student in the early to mid-1960s, I decided to become a college professor because my own teachers excited an intellectual respect unequalled anywhere else in my life. And because I respected them and their judgments, their hard-won high evaluation of my work gave me a strong sense of my own value and self-respect. For better or worse, I would not have dreamed of questioning their authority, demanding their praise, or even evaluating their performance. In short, I wanted to be like them, or as I saw them: figures of intellectual prestige and accomplishment.

After years of hard work raising three children while pursuing a PhD in English part time, I took up my profession with pride. I believed I had earned my expertise and expected to be valued and respected by my students as I had looked up to my professors, whether I had personally liked them or not. To my surprise, the world had changed, in some ways I admire, in some ways not. It is no longer possible to reproduce my own educational experience and fantasies. I believed in my education; now students believe in themselves, or say they do.

"I don't agree with your personal preferences," my undergraduate first-year writing student confidently responded to my suggestions for how to improve her essay. When I heard those words, I saw my many years of graduate training and even more years of teaching experience dissolve before my eyes. It's as if my student and I live in parallel academic universes. In mine, I am the expert who shares my expertise and evaluates student performance from the position of that expertise. In hers, I am not more likely to be right than any eighteen-year-old student; on the contrary, I don't know anything worth knowing better than she does. It's all about personal opinion anyway, so why am I troubling her with my "opinions" when she has her own perfectly good ones already? My intellectual authority as her professor is equivalent to a useful fiction, a semi-ironic game she agrees to for a short time for pragmatic reasons, with the understanding that we both know it is faintly ridiculous. She believes in herself, and that belief is quite unshakable.

Yet it is mandatory that I give this student a grade; moreover, she herself wants an evaluation of her performance. Not just any evaluation, however; she demands—insists—on a good one, because she believes in herself. My job is to confirm what she already knows; in other words, to give it the institutional stamp that will enable her to get the job she desires or entrance to the grad school she covets.

No Definitive Answers

A teacher of math or science would probably not receive the following student evaluation: "She had an attitude like because she has a PhD we were wrong and don't know as much as her." The question of who is "right" and "wrong" and what it means to "know" something is, of course, more problematic in the humanities classroom, where interpretive methodologies are themselves objects of scrutiny, than it is in science or math courses. I imagine that teachers of hard facts and bodies of empirical knowledge have it easy in the grading department; evaluating the quality of what is known or understood is in-herently difficult when the "what" of a text is not self-evident. The field I love and have chosen to teach, literature and writing, is notoriously based on a high degree of subjectivity,as are the humanities generally. Subjectivity of consciousness, one might say, is its glory, but therein, too, lies the rub—or, I should say, its ability to rub the wrong way.

A recent e-mail message from a bright and sincere student illustrates the conflicting messages she receives in her education: "I just get so frustrated. Of course there are no definitive answers, so it seems to me we aren't supposed to argue anything—just merely accept that there are many different sides and nothing can be resolved. I get tired of saying, 'This seems most likely to mean this, because of these examples . . . but, of course, it could also mean that, because anything is possible.'"

Rather than feeling liberated and empowered by interpretive freedom, this student is inhibited and exasperated. Students often grasp after certainties, if only their own. While doing so might appear to contradict their tendency to "believe in themselves," it seems to me simply the other side of the same coin of our own pedagogical uncertainties.

Students who believe in and champion their own interpretive freedom, based on the presumed subjectivity of knowledge, often face the other way to accuse their teachers of not evaluating their interpretations objectively: "He only praises the writing he likes," one student complained to me of a colleague. In other words, both teacher and student often give lip service to interpretive subjectivity when that is convenient, yet demand adherence to objective standards when it suits their respective agendas. Given the inherent tension between professor and student built into the grading system, the result is that, too often, no one is satisfied.

I do not believe that my disappointment is just sour grapes. What I describe is a conflict enacted in many university humanities classrooms. The changing value conferred on student opinion and educator authority has caused flux and uncertainty in the traditional relations between teacher and student. At best, the change confuses students and teachers; at worst, it is detrimental to education.

A recent headline in a newspaper article about a local great books program read "Great Books Program Shows Kids There's Never a Wrong Answer." If there are no wrong answers, then intellectual understanding is not so different from feeling and personal taste. It is difficult, however, to justify evaluating and grading feeling and taste, as opposed to knowledge of the hard facts and formulae of the science or math classroom.

It does not help to claim that a student must justify his or her position or show evidence for an interpretation if we negate the teacher's authority to decide what constitutes justification or valid evidence. So what to do? If you and I can't agree how Charlotte Brontë meant us to read Jane Eyre, or even whether that is important, then it is easier to discuss how you react to the novel, whether you like it, and what it personally does or does not mean to you. No one then can agree or disagree with you—because it's all about you.

Exchanging the intellectual authority of the professor for an ethos of self-expression among students is not equivalent to following the Socratic ideal of critical dialogue leading to self-development on the path to truth. The recent change in the meaning and value of objective knowledge, which leads some students to presume that all interpretations are equally valid, implies that all that we can know and learn should be treated as purely subjective, which was not quite Plato's idea.

One of my colleagues has evaded this problem by refusing to grade the content of a student's work; if assignments are completed, students receive A's. Analysis of a text in his classroom becomes synonymous with self-expression; response is essentially feeling. Observing his class, I was amused that his comment on all student responses to his questions about the reading was a uniform "Hmm . . . interesting." Would Socrates have commented "Hmm . . . interesting"? Yet at some points, when he liked what a student had to say, he did allow himself a perhaps unintentional double "Interesting . . . interesting!" I suspect his class quickly learned that the singular "interesting" was not the praise they were looking for, while he remained blithely unaware of hierarchically evaluating those subjective responses.

"The thing is," a student once told me after I had tried to introduce a different idea about a text from her own, "a good teacher doesn't give her opinion, she should just help us talk about our opinions so we can learn from each other." Can students in fact learn best from each other? What is the teacher's role besides being a kind of glorified (but not much better paid) camp counselor? How does the humanities classroom differ from the amateur book club or the midnight bull session in the dorm? Where does the idea originate that all ideas are equally valid in the classroom, and how do we go about sorting out its effects?

Origins of the Problem

The critic Alvin Kiernan wrote in The Death of Literature that construing interpretation in literature as a matter of personal choice reflects a much larger social transformation, including that from print to electronic culture, which has loosened, blurred, and dissolved all sorts of traditional boundaries. I, too, see multiple and wide-ranging origins of the trend I have been describing. Here is my own short list of influences that have contributed to it:

1. New Age psychology, the contemporary emphasis on self-esteem, and the high valuation of feeling in post-Freudian society.

Historian Richard Hofstadter, in his classic study Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, traces the path of self-help models from "muscular Christianity" in the nineteenth century—which relied on faith rather than intellectual or rational endeavors to spur self-development—to inspirational thinking in the twentieth. He sees them as giving rise to contemporary notions of spirituality and increasing Americans' interest in self-transforming therapies, forming a kind of mystical endorsement of faith over critical inquiry in the absence of hard empirical evidence, or even in its presence. More broadly, I would add, American ideology values the individual "self" as a locus of salvation, requiring self-expression and a romantic, heroic insistence on personality: "finding one's passion," "following one's dream," or "believing in oneself." Thus I have seen the following comments in student evaluations of a first-year writing class: "There was a lack of personal attention"; "She wasn't caring enough of the student's whole life." (Emphasis added.)

2. Postmodern deconstruction of objective truth.

As critics such as Kiernan, Gerald Graff, and Terry Eagleton have shown, the institutionalization of the humanities in university teaching was fraught with argument. The contemporary deconstruction of sacred cows, presumed universals, and objective, disinterested neutral positions from which to read the truth has filtered down in popular form from the most arcane of theorists to the first-year college student—at least in the elite universities. Yet postmodern views of knowledge coexist with a university culture that increasingly values vocational and applied knowledge, and with a broader social ethos that continually measures and quantifies what is known—thus the conflict over the all-important grades.

3. Anti-authoritarian movements and the combined effect of respect for individual feeling and the destabilization of objective knowledge as a liberating force for participatory democracy.

The idea that one opinion is as good as another, that no reading should be privileged over another, aligns well with democratic respect for multiple faiths, cultures, ways of life, and beliefs of all kinds. But respect for diverse ways of thinking or being may appear to confer equal truth value on them all. Creativity, including openness of expression in interpretation and writing, is seen as liberating, and freedom and autonomy of self replace the unquestioned authority of traditional figures of power, personal as well as political, parent and teacher as well as king and nobility. All opinions are, students will tell you, "as good" as each other, although that term frequently remains unexamined. Authoritativeness is suspect as a form of repressive or exploitative influence; interpretive freedom is seen as democratic leveling. The ideal of liberal education is that it is a meritocracy of sorts, but how can you have a meritocracy without a shared definition of merit?

4. Student-centered pedagogy emphasizing the transfer of power and knowledge from teacher to learner.

Originating with primary education, student-centered or constructivist classrooms stress the importance of student voices and experience, enabling students to be active learners rather than passive receivers of instruction. Progressive in its sympathy with multiculturalism and student empowerment, forward looking as a humane response to standardized testing and other rigid methods of teaching and learning, student-centered pedagogy combines postmodern deconstructions of truth and anti-authoritarian impulses. Its goal is to change the organization of the class from one in which an authoritarian teacher directs and controls the transmission of knowledge to one in which students "own" their own learning through the diffusion of authority.

5. Consumerism in education. Students and their parents see themselves as buying an education—both a luxury item and a means of entry to middle-class professions.

They therefore believe they are en-titled to satisfaction as consumers; likewise, colleges see themselves as businesses that produce and sell services for a profit. Acquisitiveness and an ethos of self-gratifying consumerism merge with the other influences I have described to form a "belief in oneself" among the pri-vileged. This belief forms a foun-dation for "achieving one's dream," which historian of psychology Philip Cushman characterizes as the pervasive sense among well-off Americans of "unconditional entitlement [to] speaking their mind, expressing their feelings, getting their way." Students believe they deserve rewards because they put down their money and did some work for their grade; they see the evaluation of their performance as necessary but highly questionable—though only, it must be said, when that evaluation is not to their liking.

6. Television and other electronic media.

Electronic entertainment has led to a decline in the glamour of cultural literacy in favor of the value of celebrity. It has also given rise to the famous short attention span and the immediate gratification encouraged by electronic media. Students often complain that long or difficult texts bore them, as if entertainment is our goal in the classroom. One student, for example, wrote: "I was not incredibly interested by any of the readings." Celebrity teachers, however, are frequently immune to students' dismissal of teacher authoritativeness: a prize-winning novelist who teaches creative writing at a prestigious university recently boasted to me that he freely tells students that their writing is "stupid" or "boring," comments that could get an ordinary adjunct fired. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, his comments are welcomed, because he is the academic equivalent of a movie star.

Notably, the trend I am generalizing about seems very much tied to social class and privilege. I have taught classes at Columbia University and New York University, and I have directed a college program for low-income students in Harlem. So I have experienced to an unusual degree the full continuum of students, those from the poorest homes to those who have every privilege and resource imaginable.

These variations in background affect students' attitudes toward classroom learning, especially the meaning of knowledge. My experience has convinced me that the differences between low-income and privileged students are not obviously attributable to intelligence, diligence, or character, but to sharply dissimilar expectations of themselves as consumers of knowledge. Of course, most of the privileged students arrive with more general information, better basic skills, and far better access to resources than their less privileged counterparts. But the most important instrument in their tool kit is not the laptop computer; it's their expectation of entitlement to the riches of this world, cultural as well as material. My students in Harlem entirely lack this sense of entitlement. They accept the authoritativeness of their teachers quite readily. My students at Adelphi, a local, mostly working- to middle-class university on Long Island, are somewhat less tolerant of it, and the students I've had at Columbia and NYU are the least accepting of all.

Price to Be Paid

I worry the reader may believe I am a cultural conservative; on the contrary, I consider myself a progressive in social, political, and pedagogical matters. I support opening up the canon of classic literature to new or minority voices, for example. Moreover, I generally favor evaluating teachers: as a student decades ago, I had professors who abused their authority, negated interpretations without giving good reasons, or mocked student responses.

Just as I have raised my children to express their feelings and views in ways that would have been unthinkable with my own parents, I enjoy and encourage an informal, friendly, "democratic" atmosphere in my classroom—although I confess to still being startled when a student addresses me by my first name. And I sympathize with the intellectual movement that has questioned the concept of disinterested knowledge, as I sympathize with political movements that oppose entrenched social hierarchies and authoritarianism. All these contradictory impulses make for more, not less, confusion for both my students and me. It leads to a crisis of confidence expressed in an ongoing argument between faculty and students in which the terms and sides are not clearly defined.

When I have spoken to colleagues about these questions, I have been taken aback by the range of views they hold, within the same university and even within the same department. No one had quite the reaction of a nonacademic British friend, that students should be made to suffer as much as possible because education is the intellectual equivalent of molding brains like headcheese. But a strong demarcation divided those who see themselves as progressives empowering students in the classroom and those who focus on what they see as the educational price to be paid for that view.

The more traditional teachers with whom I talked favored limiting the validation of students' interpretations and opinions. "Students should have the power to make judgments, but the discussion has to be organized to bring them to an understanding of our own," said a retired associate dean at Adelphi. "As teachers, our questions must come out of our own knowledge of the material, our own interpretive perspective, and our own imaginings of students' responses." In other words, leading a discussion, asking questions, or provoking responses implies an inescapable authoritativeness, whether we like it or not, just as grades do.

My colleague objects to the idea that it diminishes students to have to attend to the professor's view; a liberal education, he says, consists of learning from the hard work of listening to what is unfamiliar, challenging, and not one's own. He believes the experience of education is thinned out when professorial authority is neutralized. In what way do students lose power by being in the presence of someone who has a strong intellectual vision, he wants to know; why should that dampen students' self-esteem? Authoritativeness does not squash spirit, he told me; on the contrary, it teaches students what is possible in the realm of interpretation, that is, how to think and argue persuasively.

Schools of education often teach student-centered pedagogy to future primary and secondary school teachers. Like my traditional colleagues, advocates of the constructivist classroom also want to teach students how to think—and consider themselves no less rigorous because they use opinion as a starting point for discussion. "The idea," says a colleague in the education school at my university, "is to expose learners to multiple points of view, multiple interpretive frameworks, including those beyond what they already know." He says that difficulties arise when teachers value subjective constructions of knowledge and personal experience, yet students must develop justifications for them that are graded. This colleague thinks the battle between student- and teacher-centered learning distracts from the real point. The goal, he believes, is to do innovative student-centered teaching well, which is much harder than leading a traditional teacher-centered classroom.

Everyone seems to support the teaching of critical inquiry, yet many complain that students focus less on learning than they should. Students seem more apathetic, if not downright lazy. Most faculty worry that although classrooms now have less rote learning and more discussion, education does not seem better than before. "How can there be real student learning if so little is demanded of them?" asks a friend in the philosophy department. A provocative and challenging teacher, he has been accused by students of making them "feel bad" when he disagrees with them.

Many, like him, see students as inadequately prepared, lacking basic writing skills and foundational knowledge, constantly complaining about hard work or boredom, and expecting spoon feeding and handholding. He believes that for all the emphasis on feeling good in our educational system, for all the students' narcissism and self-indulgence, they seem more depressed, aimless, or apathetic than before; for all the lip service given to critical thinking, independent inquiry, and active learning, students appear more passive than ever, wanting reassurance rather than challenge.

Whether or not we suspect that students use postmodern views of knowledge to justify their own intellectual laziness, the questions remain: Can one stress the subjectivity of conflicting truth accounts yet resist the idea that any interpretation is valid? Must one guard the belief in the sacred authority of art and the singular truth of texts in order to assert authoritativeness? And finally, does authoritativeness necessarily imply repressive authority?

Although I have my own pedagogical uncertainties, I would at least like to draw a firm line between the idea that many views are possible and valuable, on the one hand, and the idea that all views are of equal value, so that little is left to discuss besides taste or how one "feels" about and "reacts to" a text. How far do we want to teach students to "believe in themselves"? Certainly, we all want education to be better than it has been. But if we do not have a concept of value and a shared definition of knowledge, how will we know if or when we have achieved our goal?

Susan Ostrov Weisser is professor of English at Adelphi University. She is author of A Craving Vacancy: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740-1880 and editor of two anthologies in women's studies.

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