The Student: A Short History
By Michael S. Roth
Yale University Press, 2023
Michael Roth is a social and cultural historian (Princeton PhD), president of Wesleyan University and an early critic of President Donald Trump on immigration, anti-semitism and Israel. For this reason, lots of people will immediately flip to the end of his latest work, “The Student,” where he discusses conservative charges that “tenured radical,” perhaps even Marxist professors indoctrinate students with their own views (152), and prepare to do battle.
This would be a mistake.”The Student” is not a political screed, nor is it a scholarly tome, as it's probably shorter and more thinly sourced than his doctoral dissertation, if still a little densely worded at times. Starting in ancient times and working his way through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and into the modern era, Roth provides interesting insight into the role of education and society and the relationship between students and teachers, most notably Confucius, Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth, Immanuel Kant, Jean Jacques Rousseau and William EB DuBois. For this reviewer, a retired high school social studies teacher, definitely not an intellectual historian, the book is a treasure hunt of sorts. Anyone involved or interested in today’s secondary and college education finds anecdotal historical perspectives on issues both pegagogic, administrative and societal. They can both bemoan what’s been lost along the way student-wise and be thankful for what remains.
Take for example Confucius’ pupils Zigon and Yan Hui. The former was a strong student who mastered the material, wrote well and got good grades but lacked empathy. He had an underdeveloped “de,” or personal virtue, which the master saw as essential in fostering communal harmony. Yan Hui on the other hand loved every aspect of learning and derived joy at interacting with his teachers.
Today most leading American universities (including Dr. Roth's) have formal admission standards that require high school students to take and excel in courses in the arts, language, humanities, social science, physical science and math. To graduate, the students are generally required to take a quarter to a third of their courses across the curriculum. Is this a system that sets up the latter day Zigons for success, as well as one that robs Yah Hui of some of his joy. Throw in the American insistence on ranking colleges and universities and we’re left with more and more students applying to the same colleges and, in the case of a Washington, DC private school, parents sabotaging the work of their children’s peers or suing the school for grade discrimination. One wonders what Rousseau, who saw education as a means of creating compassion, not competition, among students and, one assumes, families.
Roth also tells the story of Thomas Jefferson wanting to give his students intellectual autonomy to find what they really wanted was personal autonomy, freedom from rules as befitting their elite social status. This issue hasn’t gone away, and maybe has even been augmented by a new form of educational quid pro quo; given what it took to be admitted, the part of the workload outside their comfort zone and the cost ($96,000 for Wesleyan), the students (and their parents) seek assessment autonomy – i.e all A’s all the time – and the guarantee of a decent job upon graduation, education not an end, but a means to an end.
Not every reader will share in the above observations but that’s the point. “The Student” is both short enough and broad enough to allow the reader/”student” of Roth’s work to consume what’s presented, decide which is most interesting/important/controversial and react accordingly, in support or opposition. All this makes him less a culture war lightening rod and more a national conciliator.