I’m often amazed at the size of my students’ egos and, to be honest, their cajones. An illustrative anecdote: I recently read several midterm papers by students who lambasted Plato, Aristotle, Kant and other great thinkers of the West for being, variously, “naive”, “idiotic”, “illogical”, and “close-minded.” While seemingly unburdened by the assignment’s requirement that they explicate and explain the theories of these philosophers, some of my students opted instead to indulge in diatribes against their “inability to think outside the box,” their “obsession with the wrong issues,” and their “ignorance about the obvious mistakes in their theories.”
Now, I should say that I do encourage my students to be critical and to try and find their own “philosophical voice.” But what I sometimes get instead is the most base version of right-wing talk show polemics. Is this a generational thing? I mean, it never would have occurred to me, when I was an undergraduate, to make such bold and unsubstantiated generalizations, nor would I ever have assumed that I knew all there was to know about, say, Kant, just by reading one of his essays!
This just reinforces my longstanding suspicion that the realtionship students have to their professors, their classes, and their education in general today is very, very different than my experience as an undergraduate. (I never would have written some of the emails to my professors that I receive from my students!) I want to resist the temptation to buy in to the current ad-campaign that labels these kids the “me” generation, but sometimes… well…. doesn’t anyone read Greek tragedy anymore? or the Bible, for that matter? Is it no longer the case that one of the timeless truths of humanity concerns the dangers of hubris?
What gives?