Are class discussions truly discussions? This question has occupied my mind since my roommate’s first history class at Swarthmore. As an engineering and math double major, she was unfamiliar with the seminar structure of social science classes. The moment we met outside of Sharples Dining Hall, she asked me, “What is up with these classes? Why don’t people build off of each other’s points? One person will say something, and the next person will completely skip over their point and speak about a completely different topic. Is this normal for classes like this?”
For a moment, I was taken aback. For the past two years, I’ve grown accustomed to this class structure, in which students effectively take turns lecturing.
This question made me think about the previous courses I have taken at Swarthmore. A particular class stood out in memory. My freshman year, I took a political science course mainly composed of upperclassmen. This did not faze me. I confidently walked into the classroom, set my bag down in the first row, and sat down eagerly waiting to learn about a topic I knew nothing about. While waiting for the professor to enter the room, I couldn’t help but hear this man’s brazen voice loudly speaking with his friend. Their topic of discussion was his LSAT schedule: Mondays and Wednesdays are dedicated to logic, Tuesdays and Thursdays to reading comprehension, and Fridays to his practice tests. Anything below a 170 is a death sentence. The seeds of doubt started to creep in my mind. Maybe I should have taken a first-year seminar.
When the professor walked in, the doubts that had begun to flood my mind disappeared. I truly was just excited to learn. The moment the professor asked a question to the class, my hand shot up to answer him. For the life of me, I cannot remember what I said. All I can remember is the feeling that stirred up within me. The professor gave me an approving nod before calling on the next person. Nothing could bring me down from this pure feeling of ecstasy — well, something did drag me down.
The next person called on was the LSAT demon; in his response, he completely glided over the content of my statement. You would have thought that in the time I was speaking, there was complete silence, and he was our savior who blessed us with his hot take on surveillance states. (Spoiler alert: he thought they were bad, and it took him five minutes to get to that conclusion.) Before this day, I had never heard someone speak at such a fast rate, nor use the word dichotomy so liberally. This feeling of being disregarded and being intellectually inferior was a sledgehammer to my academic curiosity. By the next class, I found myself in the last row — mute and afraid that anything I said would sound idiotic next to the sermons performed by my peers.
Swarthmore, as a liberal arts institution, prides itself on fostering a collaborative learning environment, promising a space that will “nurture the confidence, curiosity and humility to be challenged intellectually, to fulfill personal and professional aspirations, and to interact respectfully with those from a variety of backgrounds.” We must question to what extent this mission has been achieved. Can this vision of a liberal arts education exist while students continue to participate merely to hear themselves speak? This phenomenon leads to classroom environments where instead of listening to one another, everyone is merely waiting for their turn to preach. Such actions are not only antithetical to Swarthmore’s goal of fostering curiosity and open dialogue, but to the liberal arts tradition as a whole.
The question remains: Who is at fault for the death of earnest discussions? I do not believe it is completely the failure of professors. From my experience, when a student begins to lecture in the place of the professor, their faces become engulfed with a look of confusion. Professors actively try to facilitate genuine conversations, as evident with their obsession with circle and horseshoe arrangements of desks. By placing us in sight of one another, they hope to get students to speak with one another and not at each other.
Truth be told, I also do not believe the problem solely lies on the shoulders of students. There are deeply rooted institutional and cultural factors that incentivize this form of preachy “discussions.” At an institution such as Swarthmore, students who have spent much of their life being treated as the smartest person suddenly find themselves surrounded by people who have been treated the same way. I suspect that in order to reconcile with this loss of identity, students find themselves performing to prove to themselves and to others that they are smart and deserving of being in these academic spaces. While this defensive reaction to being thrown into a new environment is understandable, many students fail to learn that the purpose of seminars, in their nature, is to be collaborative rather than competitive. I do not say this to cast judgment, as I am personally familiar with this form of compensation.
At risk of sounding hyperbolic, I believe that the majority of students are unintentionally subscribing to the solipsist idea that only your mind truly exists: “I alone am real.” We have become obsessed with the ego, and we carry this with us into the classroom. This individualistic mentality results in students alienating their own minds from diverse perspectives, resulting in them becoming intellectually isolated and incapable of achieving the purpose of a liberal arts education.
What do we do with this? It seems the efforts of professors to facilitate conversations are unsuccessful. How does one force people to listen and engage with one another? I truly do not know. Perhaps we should talk about it.
