The other day, a friend of mine mentioned in an email that a mutual acquaintance of ours from grad school who, like us, works as a college professor, had just published a book. So I took to Google to discover more information about this work

The friend in question is smart, honest, kind, friendly, exceedingly likeable, and the kind of person it is almost impossible to imagine as the enemy of anyone. I think we became friends, at least in part, because of her nearly saintly character. She recognized me back in graduate school as someone who was rather less skilled than she is at refraining from useless antagonism of other people, and she apparently felt a compulsion to aid and comfort a poor outcast suffering somewhat from his lack of ability in this area.

When I put her name into the search engine, however, one of the first things that popped up, which—as is undoubtedly true for many college professors,—was her “Rate My Professor” reviews. I was intensely surprised to see negative comments about her that resemble those on my own RMP  page. (Yes, I have looked at mine, to my eternal regret).

The transgression? Boring lectures. Oh, how students today hate, hate, hate what they have come to understand as “boring lectures.”

To repeat myself, my friend and I could not be more different in our interpersonal styles. She is perpetually smiling, tiny, totally non-threatening, and cute as a button. I am towering and menacing, bearing an unfortunate resemblance to Klaus Kinski’s vampire in Herzog’s Nosferatu, so I probably look as though I am contemplating something grim even when I am smiling (and, sometimes, I am!).

The relevant thing in this case, however, is that the two of us agree about the best way of educating students. We both believe that in imparting knowledge to young people, the insights of older people who know more than they do are considerably more valuable than the views of other, mostly knowledge-free young people, and we believe that such knowledge is often offered most economically and most effectively in the form of what is known as the lecture.

The experience I have gathered in my years of looking at the teaching evaluations of colleagues and comparing that data to what I know of their commitment (or lack thereof) to the now nearly universally vaunted “student-centered” classroom, leads me to believe that many college students today—indeed, many  more than in previous generations—are constitutionally incapable of benefiting from lectures. They may well have had that incapacity from birth. But something has happened to retard that ability. Indeed, they are now even mostly incapable of distinguishing boring lectures from the non-boring ones.

The term “boring lecture” is redundancy for such students. All lectures are boring, because anything that means that I have to remain still for a minute and listen to others tell me valuable things they have gathered from long years of study that I will likely never undertake myself is, by definition, boring. There is little curiosity on their part about what’s on offer. Instead, it is as if they are asking, “Where is the constant fun we were promised? Where are the balloons and the cake? Where are the dancing bears and the clowns?”

I suspect much of what such students describe (and despise) as “boring lectures” are not even lectures, but rather episodes in which an attempt is made to generate student discussion of a text or idea, and the students are silent and the person in the room who understands the subject at hand just finally goes “OK, I tried and they don’t care to discuss this. So let me salvage the rest of the time we have by giving them some information.” I speak as a veteran of this experience.

What do students who complain so incessantly and sorrowfully about “boring lectures” want in their place? They want excitement. They want to be constantly in action. They have been told (by people who should know better) that this is how education works. They want to talk about popular culture or personal matters in small groups in which they are supposed to be discussing the text we have read today. They want whatever they are thinking right now, even if it is consummately ill-considered and not even informed by a casual reading of the material at hand, to be gushed over and valued by passive observers. They certainly do not want to be reminded how much they have yet to learn to get anywhere near competence in subject matters to which they are strangers.

Above all they don’t want an expert on a topic to tell them what he or she knows about it or to attempt, thereby, to benefit them with that expert knowledge. They don’t want the Sage on the Stage. They want the Guide on the Side. Better still, the Peer in the Rear.

None of this is their fault. They are young, and they have been told foolish things about education by too many of their elders. But the fact that they are blameless for  wrong ideas  does not make those ideas less wrong.

It doesn’t matter how many students write reviews of me accusing me of the sin of “boring lectures.” I am going to keep lecturing forever.

You see, I know how much benefit I derived from knowledgeable lecturers as a student. It was, and is, immeasurable to me. I still recall with warm fondness sitting in huge lecture halls as a freshman and being regaled with the wisdom of people who had forgotten more about the subjects they were addressing than I will ever know. These experiences were the highlight of my undergraduate years. They were the best of those times, easily. I learned a tremendous amount from those lectures and those lecturers. I admired and envied the people who performed such intellectual performance art, and I wanted to learn how to become someone capable of that same fascinating craft.

I also remember quite clearly my experiences with what was the first generation of the “Guide on the Side/Student-Directed Classroom” faculty. (The species already existed then, but it had decades to go before it would wholly overrun the higher ed ecosystem). The main thought that was constantly in my head in these classes run by people who frequently made it patently clear that they really didn’t know a lot more about the topic of the course than I did was this: “Why am I paying money to hear what other unread 18-year-olds, most of whom scored considerably below me on all the standardized tests, think about international politics, or 19^th century French literature? I don’t care what they think about those topics, which I know is terribly uninformed in any event. And if I did care what they thought about those topics, I could find that out for free in the dorms after classes are finished for the day and I had learned some things about these topics from experts.”

I have known people employed in Education Departments, and I know their responses to this position. I have much empirical evidence from which I can evaluate their judgment and their intelligence. I have seen them generate hot new educational pedagogy after hot new educational pedagogy over the years. I have seen what they call the “research on educational outcomes” (which is nearly always just asking teachers whether they liked how class went and students whether they think they learned a lot) that they use to evaluate the successes of the latest new educational pedagogy. I have heard them talk and I have read the things they write. That data would be enough for me to feel confident in going about my business without inordinate attention to their claims, even if I didn’t already have the compelling justification of my own experience.

But I do have that experience. And the value I have gotten from expert lecturing professors in my life is like the Sun in magnitude compared to the tiny asteroid of the Education People’s claims about the “student-centered” classroom.

Here is a response I have heard often from The Education People when they hear my criticisms of the “student-centered classroom”: “Why are you so elitist? Why can you not accept that real knowledge might come from below rather than above? Haven’t you learned as much from your students as they have from you?!”

That last remark about the balance of learning in exchanges of students and teachers is something I have heard and seen written by college professors dozens of times . A version of this sentiment once graced the entrance to the library of the school where I am employed: We are all teachers here.

It is hard for me to express how wrong I think that is. It has confused  the whole nature of teaching. When my students and I gather in a classroom, the task at hand is the study of the discipline I have mastered a. No student has ever taught me anything about social theory or human nature in the 25 years I’ve been doing this. If students are teaching you about the discipline in which you are purportedly an expert and they are not, that’s probably a good indication that you are not really as expert as you need to be to have this job. If we are all teachers here, after all, why are some of us being paid to teach while others pay to be taught? Isn’t that horribly unjust?

I don’t know if I qualify as a Sage on the Stage. In any event that decision ought to be made by someone other than the would-be Sage himself. I do know, however, that I fervently aspire to be one. And I have that goal, and I work assiduously toward achieving it all the time, because I know there are still some students in my classes who are not wholly unlike the student I was 40 years ago. I know they are looking to be inspired, and to learn, and to grow in the same way I looked to my teachers for those precious things.

I am not going to let them down.