{"id":2401,"date":"2017-05-16T11:58:56","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T19:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2401"},"modified":"2017-11-08T11:36:04","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T19:36:04","slug":"student-inferiority-and-superiority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2017\/05\/16\/student-inferiority-and-superiority\/","title":{"rendered":"Student inferiority and superiority"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was struck today by something Harry Brighouse remarked at Crooked Timber<\/a> (drawing on\u00a0his own graduation remarks).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

An eminent professor at a well-known university on the East Coast once alerted me to two distinctions. First, between students who need to learn that they matter just as much as everyone else, and the students who need to learn that everyone else matters just as much as they do. Then, between students who are smarter than they think they are, and students who think they are smarter than they are. The joy of teaching here is that so many of our students are smarter than they think they are, and need to learn that they matter just as much as everyone else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On a crude first approximation, these two distinctions could be glossed as “elites vs non-elites” and “narcissists vs self-deprecators.” One might of course guess\u00a0that the two distinctions sometimes map onto each other, but that’s not what I wanted to say.<\/p>\n

What I wanted to say is just that, in my fairly brief experience teaching, there is a weird problem with\u00a0the first distinction \u2014 “between students who need to learn that they matter just as much as everyone else, and the students who need to learn that everyone else matters just as much as they do.” In brief:\u00a0some non-elite students\u00a0both<\/em> don’t think they matter,\u00a0and<\/em> are curiously indifferent to the mattering of some further others.<\/p>\n

So on one hand, my non-elite students typically\u00a0haven’t had that sense of manifest destiny or at least ingrained self-worth that elite university students tend to get\u00a0from\u00a0their family trajectories, their educational\u00a0consecration, and so on. “They know they aren’t the best,” one colleague told me laconically when I got to my postdoc. A lot of these students\u00a0are destined for the less elite type of\u00a0professional-managerial class jobs, like school teaching,\u00a0social services, or regionally oriented business. (Gender divides emerge there, of course.)<\/p>\n

This non-elite attitude extends moreover to their relationship to knowledge. A lot of these non-elite students don’t\u00a0exactly think of\u00a0themselves as mattering intellectually. They outsource a lot of their epistemic authority\u00a0to professors or other authority figures; they tend to\u00a0give in really easily in classroom situations if you challenge their views. I’ve tried to get them to question educational authority and to encourage them to develop their sense of intellectual self-worth, but that\u00a0kind of pedagogy (in addition to being a\u00a0walking contradiction) is still something I’m working on.<\/p>\n

But<\/em> in the meantime \u2014 and here we come to the problem with the initial distinction \u2014 I’ve often found that my non-elite students can\u00a0themselves be\u00a0curiously indifferent to the mattering of other social groups outside their own frame of reference. For example, I taught two years in a row on an intriguing paper on\u00a0American Indian internet access<\/a> in Southern California. And both times I found a remarkable indifference among my students towards this\u00a0indigenous population, even though the sites in question are\u00a0only an hour or two away from my classroom in\u00a0Southern California, and thus one might think potentially part of our local space of social knowledge.\u00a0One\u00a0of my students, voicing prejudice in the guise of reading the assigned reading, went so far as to\u00a0accuse American Indians of being “lazy.” In all cases, it was hard\u00a0for my students to\u00a0really take seriously the actual existence of the people in question. (I suspect that the same would be true for other ethnographic cases farther removed in time and space from their present.)<\/p>\n

In short:\u00a0it’s possible\u00a0both<\/em> to need to learn that you matter “just as much as\u00a0everyone else,”\u00a0and<\/em> to need to learn “that everyone else\u00a0matters just as much as you do.” Perhaps the elite-nonelite distinction\u00a0that I introduced above is, in the end,\u00a0a very poor gloss on a\u00a0complex field of\u00a0social hierarchy and\u00a0recognition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was struck today by something Harry Brighouse remarked at Crooked Timber (drawing on\u00a0his own graduation remarks).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[485,494],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2401"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2496,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401\/revisions\/2496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}