Of course we all face objective, concrete impediments to achieving our goals, and some of them might be difficult or impossible to get around. Additionally, it’s obviously the case that we all have different abilities and strengths – as well as circumstances and opportunities – and not everything that one particular person can do is an option for everyone else. However, and without any contradiction, I would say that in most contexts the options that are indeed available to us are almost universally broader than we perceive at first, and after we succeed, we frequently see in hindsight how many opportunities we had which we didn’t even realize were there all the time in front of us waiting to be seized. One of the most important factors that stop great ideas in their tracks is not knowing or not believing that you would in fact succeed if you just tried. Thus very often the greatest impediment to progress is not that people don’t have the means to succeed, but rather that they don’t know that they do, or don’t feel entitled to do it. What they need most is to be encouraged to take the initiative, and to be shown how to do it.

In spite of that, when discussing student improvement and success in the context of teaching and education, the emphasis in practice tends almost always to be on how to make the student the passive object of education. It tends to be on how one can most effectively upload a certain set of skills and information to the minds of human beings whether they want it or not. It oozes of a caricatural behavioristic mindset in which students are to be trained to automatically display certain responses when exposed to certain stimuli instead of being helped to developed the cognitive tools to be better equipped to understand what their options are when facing a variety of situations.

I propose that besides this being an inherently violent and invasive approach, besides the fact that this is borderline (or even downright) immoral, I submit to the reader’s consideration that this approach simply does not work, or works very poorly, specially in a day and age where the high-level skill sets that are going to be needed for being a productive member of society even next year are not necessarily clear or even understood by those in charge of teaching. And one of the main reasons it doesn’t work is because it squarely misses the point above – that unless education is set up to empower people instead of bossing them around, it will be worse than useless if we want students to actually understand anything.

I suppose I don’t have to argue very arduously to convince the reader that the current systems of traditional education are completely out of synch with the needs and expectations of modern societies. This should be obvious; if there’s still any doubt, compare what the syllabi for most courses say students should be learning and what they actually know if asked one year later. Most of them wouldn’t be able to confess the most basic facts about math, physics, chemistry or grammar to save their lives. So even if we (boldly) assume that the syllabi are adequate and accessible, it’s still a huge waste of mostly everyone’s time. But how can we fix it?

Again, what I am arguing here is that the single most severe limitation to improvement and success does not arise from lack of opportunities, resources, infrastructure, investment or – I cringe at the notion – more and stricter rules, assignments, hours. It’s not that all those things don’t make a difference, but in the overall scheme, what a student could do even with very limited resources by today’s standards hugely exceeds what they are actually doing – if they only felt motivated to do so, if they only knew that they could do so. But instead, we are breeding whole generations of underachievers, of people whose achievements greatly lag behind their potential.

Is that happening because we were not implacable enough in forcing them to “learn” stuff? Or maybe we need to give them even more “information”? My take is that unless we change our perspective from bossing them around to actively empowering them, we’ll still have a system that is not only unable to help prepare autonomous critical self-motivated human beings, but actually works against that goal.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, I agree that some degree of structure is fundamental for the formation of a balanced personality, but having more of something that is not working won’t fix a broken system. In fact, it will probably make it worse. Unless there are fundamental changes in the overall attitude and paradigm, it will be more of the same, like in the old joke :

- “Waiter!”

- “Yes, sir?”

- “This dish tastes awful! It’s inedible! Improper for human consumption!”

- “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. We won’t charge you for it then. Is there anything else I can do?”

- “Well, yes, additionally the portions are too small!”

The current state of affairs in some supposedly educational contexts is so corrupt that one would be best served by staying home and watching re-runs of Scooby Doo. For many people this would at least mean that they wouldn’t have their self-esteem squashed and their respect for the value and usefulness of academic pursuit permanently shaken.

For average victims of failing educational systems, the lessons they actually take home have little to do with feeling (or being) empowered to better reach their full potential, their personal goals, or even to be prepared to match their abilities to the needs of society in a mutually beneficial and constructive fashion. No, no.

Instead what they actually “learn” or at least come to believe is that “academic” knowledge is something separate and divorced from actual knowledge. It doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t have to be useful, it doesn’t have to be relevant, it doesn’t even have to be true. But it does have to be mimicked and repeated to the satisfaction of the authorities in charge, who will check your ritualistic performance for an adequate level of conformance. It’s perceived as mildly useful only insofar as it helps them get an official license to enter a restricted job market – i.e. a degree. The overall mindset that spontaneously emerges is often that academic knowledge is something arcane and byzantine that you have to hold in your hands just long enough to get a degree and which you then gladly drop like a hot potato when the ritual is done.

On top of that, they also learn that challenging authority and questioning established practice is dangerous, costly and best avoided.

Most unfortunately, these are precisely the bizarro world nonskills whose opposite is desperately needed in a society that changes at an increasingly faster rate.

So when students are told in effect and for most purposes that their ideas don’t matter (or matter only in a “oh that’s cute” way), that they should listen instead of asking questions, that they should repeat instead of create, that they should fit in instead of diverge, that they should follow orders instead of taking the initiative, that they should not ”’rock the boat”, that is precisely the opposite of what they need to succeed. Again, of course I’m not saying that anarchy and condescendence are the way to go; what I am actually saying is that the most empowering and valuable result that a good education could bring about is to give people tools to rock the boat in a constructive way. People who are going to excel in almost anything need to know how and when to rock the boat, and need to know what they are talking about when they do so, and they need to develop the very complex ability (which involves much more than knowledge) of  looking at themselves and being able to judge and determine if they actually know what they are talking about. They need to develop justifiable and justified (as opposed to none or delirious) trust in their own judgment.

Realistic awareness of what is actually the case, or rather, developing the mental tools to better distinguish what is actually the case from what is not – and that includes self-awareness – is immensely more useful than memorizing any list of facts or formulas or skills picked by someone else. Even if the learning process often depends on a certain level of trust and “suspension of disbelief” if you are to pay attention to this source of information instead of that one, this should be a filter that acts on your attention budget, on the amount of effort you are willing to spend to decode and evaluate the data stream coming from that source of information. It should not instead be encouraged that information is blindly taken at face value from any source. The idea that the average citizen should believe a professor or teacher blindly “because I have a degree and a position of authority” is as ludicrous as the same claim coming from any other source accompanied by similar arguments. What one says and wants you to believe has to make sense.

When the system is set up in such a way that most students – even those who originally cared and were engaged – eventually just give up trying to make sense of what is being told to them, and shift gears to “ok, let’s just try to do whatever will most efficiently result in getting institutional approval”, that’s when the possibility of a quality education starts to die. Then the whole process becomes worse than useless – it actually encourages intellectual confusion and a fragmentation and compartmentalization of what should be a unified identity. Your mental model of the world is, in several important senses, who you are, and tinkering with it and forcing people to relinquish the requirement that what you say you believe and what you hold to be true should make sense to you results in weak, insecure, manipulable individuals. So unless that is actually the desired and expected result to be obtained from educational systems, important changes in attitude are essential.

And among the changes, probably one of the most fundamental is bridging the psychological / emotional / human gap between those who are teaching and those who are learning. Once again, I’m absolutely not saying that “Oh we all know the same things, you know, it’s arbitrary that some people are professors and others are not”. This would be disingenuous, condescending and not empowering at all. Yes, professors do know more about what they are teaching than their students – or at least good ones should. That’s precisely why it’s a good idea to listen to them. But – and that’s a big but – how do you know who to listen to if you don’t yet have the foundations to question what they are saying? Now, there comes the crucial step. The final and most crucial step of really learning anything happens when you understand something which you didn’t before. And after you manage to do that, you don’t need to cite or refer to anyone else in order to justify your new beliefs. You can refer to your own judgment instead of the professor, the textbook, the authorities or any other socially accepted source of knowledge. So that’s what you should be aiming for – to acquire this sort of solid interlocking grid of insights which anchor what you believe to your own judgment – or at least that’s what you should be going for in the areas in which you hope or desire to have a serious level of understanding. And that’s what a good teacher, instructor or professor should be trying to help you achieve. They can show you the way, show you where the pitfalls are, give you tools to help you understand. But in the end, the eventual goal should be to make you able to throw all crutches away and think for yourself.

Unfortunately, that’s absolutely not the prevailing attitude in many educational (and other) settings. One of the most perverse and destructive myths that is instilled into the minds of students – and of society in general – generation after generation is that “knowledge” equals revelation and that there’s no way to achieve it except through surrendering your own judgment to those who magically have supernatural access to it. Besides all the social, political and intellectual damage that this paradigm nurtures, this idea cripples the very identity and sense of autonomous self of those who buy into it. It’s psychologically, emotionally and even morally damaging to live your life under the belief and assumption that you are helpless, weak, unable to distinguish true from false, reality from fantasy, right from wrong, that you can’t hope to develop and cultivate the ability to do it yourself, that you need someone to constantly tell you what it is that you should believe.

But to avoid encouraging this mindset, one must make changes not only to the “objective” aspects of the system, to the syllabi and hours and course structures and assessment methods, etc… but most and above all to the human aspect of education. If professors, teachers and instructors in general present themselves as prophets instead of as learned but fallible guides who are telling you tales about what they think they know, if textbooks are seen as sacred texts instead of as personal attempts to call the reader’s attention to what the author hopes are some aspects of the truth, if the current academic consensus about a subject is described as being the ultimate and unambiguous reality instead of a snapshot of our most current and (for most subjects) probably (historically speaking) fast moving guess at what reality might actually be, then education will fail at its most important purpose, which should be empowering people to think for themselves.

Learned academics do have a lot to tell us, but we should not be encouraged to “believe” them because of their prestige, title, degree, position or power. We should instead be encouraged to listen to them, and then try very hard to figure what it is that they are talking about, and why in the world this should be true, relevant to us, or even make sense. And it seems to me that the most difficult and insidious barrier to that is fueling a psychological divide between those who hold the sacred books and the power of prophecy and those who are mere acolytes and whose heretical questioning should be met with scorn or punishment. Of course students are in many cases not in a position to seriously challenge a teacher’s knowledge or opinion on a given subject (although more often than most teachers would be prepared to admit they in fact are), but unless they ask themselves “why should this be true?” and voice their doubt when they can’t come to a satisfying answer, and are encouraged to do so, we switch from promoting learning to promoting ritualistic reverence.

So before and as a prerequisite for any learning to actually happen, the student must see that however learned the professor is, this only means that a lot of effort and time and study was put into understanding whatever is now being taught, and the professor may and frequently does deserve attention and respect because of that, but no mystical powers or revelation were involved. It’s however unfortunately the case that many academics don’t want to relinquish the mystique that derives from being “the learned one” in subjects that nobody understands and they instinctively fear or believe that they will lose their prestige, respect or value if their mastery of difficult subjects is not seen as something that only they have the superpower to conquer. So too many times instead of trying to make their teaching accessible and as crystal clear as possible, they will go the opposite route and (often even without noticing, but sometimes deliberately) go out of their way to make it obscure, mysterious and unintelligible. They will try to make it seem harder than it actually is so as to implicitly elevate their own value and standing. They will encourage students to believe them instead of acquiring the mental tools that will allow student to reach similar conclusions by themselves. They fear that if they teach too well, the student will no longer be at a position of disadvantage and hierarchical subordination. And in a sense, they are correct. That is the best result that could be expected of education – successfully elevating followers to masters of themselves.

Thus, I propose that orders of magnitude more important than the information that teachers provide to students – which in objective terms is all easily available in libraries and online nowadays anyway – and possibly more important than even the objective intellectual coaching and feedback and orientation, the single most important relevant role a teacher can play in education is effectively conveying the psychological message that “Here I am, I am a real person, I am doing this, thus maybe so can you.” It’s effectively expanding the student’s expectations to the possibility that whatever is being studied, it’s something that if one person can do, another one might, and maybe you can too, so give it a try.

One purpose of homework and exams is assessing how much students have learned. But even this objective is actually twofold : on the one hand we have to bureacratic institutional need to give grades to students, but on the other hand, there is a very important pedagogical purpose being fulfilled here which is to give students feedback on how they are faring. We should not underestimate how important it is for students to have a “reality check” assessment of how successfully they have managed to achieve the goals that were set for the course. This is in my opinion one of the strongest arguments against having just a few very long assignments which leave no space or opportunity for corrections of stance and effort from the part of the student. Many – probably most – of them don’t have an exact idea of what your exact expectations are, of how much they should know, and of how well they understood the material – until they are tested on it. But then, in a standard academic setting, it’s too late to do anything about it. So, from the beginning, I believe that a system of evaluation should be designed to *not* be a one-shot deal – students should be able to realize how much they don’t know and work from there. In fact, I believe that within the limits of what is practical, every student should be given ample, recurring opportunity to demonstrate that he or she was able to master the subjects being taught.

Which brings us to another way in which homework and exams are used and managed : as a way to “force” students to work. As I’ve repeatedly said before, I don’t think that the attitude that we’ll “force” students to do anything is desirable, useful, or even workable. At least not in terms of forcing them to do the kind of work that is pedagogically useful. Sure, we can force them to deliver “something”. But we can’t force them to think, and the more we try to do so through threats and intimidation, the poorer the results will be in terms of promoting insightful self-examination and intellectual growth. The stricter we are, the more we’ll shift their priorities from learning to bureaucratically meeting deadlines. Thus I don’t believe in scaring or stressing the students as good pedagogical practice, and I think that rules should go only as far as needed to make the whole course manageable. In particular, I certainly don’t believe in imposing unnecessary arbitrary limits and demands to “build character” or anything like that. I hold that this is one of the most dreaded (un-)pedagogical practices that I see being deliberately adopted in a reasonably widespread fashion, specially (ironically) by young professors (who apart from lack of experience may additionally be somewhat insecure and thus feel an increased need to assert their position of authority).

Once more, I don’t think that assignments and exams should be a source of as much stress for the students as they usually are, and that is still another reason to make them short, and as much as possible redundant. Students should be given ample time to finish all of their assignments, and should be told as early as possible which objectives they are expected to eventually be able to meet, so that they can plan in advance and actually try to understand what they are doing instead of being forced to submit “something” because it’s due today. Of course some students will still do it, but this should not be structurally imposed on them. I positively don’t think that homework and exams should be designed to stand as obstacles that must be transposed in order to get a grade, but rather as opportunities for the student to show understanding and mastery of the subjects being taught. Additionally, an ideal evaluation method should in my opinion not constitute a severe burden to anyone who is already proficient, especially not in terms of time that would otherwise be drained away from more useful and productive efforts. Their time is best spent trying to actually learn and understand, not on exhaustively (and very, very doubtfully) “proving” that they did, or even worse, being forced to “study” things that they already know.

Finally, I believe that any temptation to pass judgment on a student’s character, intentions, good faith or other personality traits based on the quality or consistency of his or her academic work should be fiercely resisted. There is a huge number of reasons for all kinds of behavior that might seem to be irresponsible or lazy, but besides the fact that this is absolutely not what you are there to evaluate, in almost all cases you have a very limited access to what the whole picture is for any particular student, so speculating on what his or her situation or reasons might be very easily leads to wrong and plain unfair conclusions, and if you let them thrive this will definitely harm your ability to help the student.

My position on this matter is that nurturing critical thinking is not a nice additional feature provided by a good educational system, it’s not some nice spice that you add to the main meal of knowledge, it is not an afterthought that can be retrofitted into a pedagogical proposal. No, overly not so. Incentivating and assisting students in developing critical thinking *is* in fact the meat of education, it’s all the rest that are side dishes.

Critical thinking and independent judgement can’t of course be developed in a vacuum, so students do need to study and acquire knowledge to be able to exercise it usefully; the attitude of “question everything” doesn’t go very far if not matched by hard work and an earnest desire to actually understand. On the other hand, I hold that the random memorization of encyclopedic agglomerates of arbitrary facts, much worse than being inefficient and of very narrow applicability to any real problems, actually *harms* – even prevents! – any solid understanding of the topics at hand. When the student gives up requiring that whatever he’s being compelled to regurgitate makes any sense, all is lost.

The damage caused from such a stance when teaching cannot in my opinion be overstated. It slices at the very core of what education should be trying to achieve. If one doesn’t believe that critical thinking can be brought about in the case of most students, one actually believes that such students can’t be taught. Forcing them to recite formulas mindlessly is *not* the solution, and is *not* the best that can be done under the circumstances. This will force any student in the opposite direction of what he should be going – which is getting to the point where he actually has an informed structured independent opinion on the topics being taught.

In fact, I would say that in such – unfortunately ubiquitous – cases what is lost is more than the pedagogical cause. It’s also a psychological and even moral cause that is lost, that is being mishandled here. Requiring students under threats to dutifully repeat and argue for positions which they don’t fully understand and which they may – at their present level of understanding – not even agree with is not only a disservice to their academic growth, it’s a violence to their intellectual honesty and to their character. They are actually being taught and urged to be dishonest, and this is precisely the easily observable result achieved again and again.

Additionally, presenting as facts ideas which are most of the time at best consensually accepted guesses at what the truth might be is not only intellectually disingenuous – it’s an outright lie. Unfortunately, this is the stance that many in teaching roles assume, for a variety of reasons, which range from concerns about asserting their authority, doubts about the very possibility of eliciting critical judgement in most students, and last but not least because it’s just easier and more comfortable to pretend to ourselves and others that we are unerring masters of the truth, specially when we are put in a position of power where we can bluntly overrule criticism.

In summary, not only for pedagogical but also for psychological and even moral reasons, I believe it is essential to encourage and respect the exercise of independent critical judgment. I believe it is important never to present any fact, method or idea as a mystical truth which is being magically revealed and which does not admit questioning. On the contrary, I want as much as possible to discourage blind acceptance of anything I say. In my opinion, blind acceptance is probably one of the most damaging and pervasive obstacles to true understanding of any subject. I want to introduce topics in a way that feels natural and logical to students, and I strive to provide them with solid, believable, consistent reasons to accept what I say as true or at least reasonable instead of merely requiring them to do so based on my authority and my power to punish them through grading for not doing so. I want students to realize that there are in general many different ways to solve most problems, and that any particular method I teach them is just one possibility which was conceived in a particular moment in time by real and fallible people, and which might not even be the best one. And my ultimate purpose is absolutely *not* that they will be able to repeat verbatim what *I* think is true, but that with my help they will get to a point where they have been able to develop their own informed working self-reliant opinion about the subjects at hand.

First and foremost, I believe that the most important role that a teacher can and should have in the academic life of any student is that of providing guidance, inspiration and encouragement.

This is a statement which could very easily be misunderstood, so let me start by explicitly dispelling what I don’t intend to say. I definitely don’t think that teachers should strive to take the role of charismatic messianic figures or personal gurus in the minds of students. They should absolutely not teach as if they were preachers, and they should not encourage students to develop any kind of personality cult. Although such an outcome is sometimes actively pursued by some lecturers, I don’t believe it is pedagogically useful or even morally and psychologically sound.

That being said, I also strongly reject the notion of a teacher as an impersonal conduit for pumping information into other people’s brains. If this were an effective teaching method, textbooks alone would suffice and people would simply need to pay regular visits to a library to be able to eventually master any subject they wished, which is of course patently not true for the vast majority of the students. There is a folk saying in college life which states that “Trying to get an education here is like trying to get a sip from a fire hose.” I always keep it in mind and strive to avoid all the practices and habits that lead to this being such a frequent feeling among students. I believe that drawing from their personal experiences, connecting to their reality, understanding their difficulties, addressing their particular needs, this is the real and most needed and useful role of a good teacher. The snappiest snazziest lecture on this hemisphere will never top one which actually addresses the actual needs of a particular class of students. This is even more relevant today where mere access to raw information is overwhelmingly easy and universal. If teaching was just about making information available, it would be enough to give students a pile of great books, unlimited internet access, a syllabus and then tell them to come back in a month to be tested on the material. It seems to me however that the current trend towards an increasing commoditization of academic services often works to aggravate these issues instead of mitigating them, and that includes some of the worst aspects of traditional teaching, such as a one-size-fits-all framework.

But if all of the above is what a teacher is supposed to avoid, what should be done instead? This takes us back to the opening statement : a teacher’s most appropriate and useful role is to provide guidance, inspiration and encouragement. Let’s expand on what is meant by that.

Guidance. The situation where having physical access to knowledge was an issue is well behind us. Today, essentially any person can have very easy access to more information than any human being can possibly hope to learn or understand in many lifetimes. There was arguably a time when a teacher’s main role would have been as a primary source of raw information. Nowadays, however, even in state of the art research fields this is less and less true. It’s certainly not at all the case in standard undergraduate college courses, and this holds even in most graduate level courses. So the role of a teacher is to a large extent not to repeat information that is universally available, often already in elaborate and very well presented detail, but rather to point and direct students to what is worth learning, and just as importantly (this is a point which even great lecturers frequently fail to address), to argue and explicitly explain why such topics are relevant and worthy of being studied. The privileged position of experience and mature understanding that a teacher possesses (or should possess) allows for a holistic view that a newcomer can’t match, and which is immensely more valuable than the minute mechanical details of any particular topic. To use an analogy, a map of the streets of an unknown city, although very useful, is something easily reproducible and readily decodable by any reasonably capable human being. Knowing which places are worth visiting, however, requires much more insight, especially given that for any major city an exhaustive tour is utterly unfeasible, and even more so when we consider that this is absolutely not a question that admits a single answer for all visitors. Too many teachers insist on taking the role of taxicab drivers, when their most excellent roles would be that of cicerones.

Inspiration. Another critical role of a teacher is to provide inspiration. Again, I don’t mean here that a teacher should become an object of worship or to which critical thinking is delegated. What I do mean is that a teacher should on one hand show and instill enthusiasm and love for the subjects being taught, and on the other present them with a no-nonsense “see, if I can do it you can too” attitude. Dry technical proficiency alone will consistently fail to engage the students, and this is not just a minor detail. It’s very unfortunate that (often for a collection of perverse structural reasons) lecturers many times fail to show any enthusiasm at all about what they are teaching, or (in a variation of the same problem) they do show personal enthusiasm about it but do so in an almost (when not explicitly) apologetic way. If you don’t believe (or don’t convey) yourself that what you are teaching is relevant, interesting or important, then how can you expect the students to dedicate the amount of intellectual and emotional energy necessary to venture into and feel comfortable with what for them is uncharted territory? Competence, confidence and a positive attitude go a long way towards helping them overcome this very natural psychological barrier.

Encouragement. Finally, it’s not only a matter of engaging the students intellectually and emotionally. It’s not unusual that the most difficult impediments to learning are not really about the lectures, the course or the subject itself, but lie instead in each person’s individual shortcomings of all sorts, ranging from insecurities about one’s own capacities, shyness to ask questions, inability to focus, lack of commitment and so on. Of course a teacher can’t and shouldn’t try to be an impromptu therapist who will solve a student’s personal issues. But this doesn’t mean that this dimension of teaching and learning should be ignored, or that a teacher should not take in account that such issues exist. They are there and they have a very important impact on a student’s performance, and the reaction and attitude of a teacher towards a student will very seriously affect not only the student’s ability to learn, but also the student’s emotional well-being. One should never forget, especially in degree programs, that a teacher is in a position of both power and authority with the potential to interfere with the student’s academic, professional, personal, intellectual and emotional lives. This position should be held with great care and responsibility. But conversely, it can also be conductive to an enormous amount of good if it creates an environment where the students feel safe and respected.

Unfortunately, the point and attitude that the lecturer is there mainly to actively help the students to learn is not always the prevailing one. I have attended my share of courses (and even courses on education and teaching) in the past and too often the approach (and the implicitly perceived problem to be solved, even from very well-meaning academics) seems to be “how can we best force the students to learn”. Both in theory and in practice, I believe this is a very deficient, erroneous and damaging stance to take on education at any level. The job of a teacher is absolutely not to harass and terrorize students into doing whatever is believed to be “good for them”. Learning and understanding is not some kind of sour medicine that will have the same effect on all people as long as they take it. In fact, in my experience, quite the opposite happens; it’s remarkably difficult to force someone to learn something. People are indeed capable of remarkable achievements under pressure, but this may come at too steep a cost, not only in terms of psychological balance and well being, which one might feel tempted to rationalize as justified, but also in terms of true understanding. If the demands placed on the students are arbitrarily draconian, all too often learning anything at all about reality will be altogether ditched in favor of learning to display any behavior that will most efficiently result in being left alone – which almost always does not involve spending valuable time pondering critically about the topics under consideration.

So in the end, for a variety of reasons, I hold that forcing people to repeat or recite things they don’t understand, believe or agree with is akin to intellectual rape. It destroys dignity and it is antithetical to the development of critical thinking. Relentless brainwashing can’t be justified either morally or pedagogically, especially not with the argument that “it works”. The purpose of education regarding anything more sophisticated than very basic skills is thus absolutely not to “train” or compel the individual to uncritically behave in a prescribed way when fed some standardized stimulus. It is indeed almost the opposite. True education should cooperatively change who we are, how we think and what we believe is true. If we enforce a framework which systematically compels students to “deliver” formulaic answers whose meaning or relevance completely escapes them, and which ultimately leaves them essentially unchanged as autonomous thinking human beings, we have done worse than failing in our role as teachers. In such a system, we are actually encouraging a generation of intellectually blind automata who will perform poorly when confronted with anything but artificial problems. This is a disservice to them, to the society around us, and to our own consciences. Our role, our duty as teachers is not to create robots, but instead to help human beings overcome their limitations and fears, to serve as guides and protectors so that they can feel safe and supported to venture into what for them is uncharted and mysterious new territory, eventually feeling confident enough to use and rightfully trust their own judgement in matters where they would previously not dare. Our ultimate and eventual job is to empower our students, not to judge, boss or control them.