In his Meditations, Emperor Marcus Aurelius thanks his grandfather for keeping him out of school, describing it as one of the most significant gifts of his life. Although Marcus was an avid pupil of Stoic philosophy, most Romans of his class endured a curriculum of rote memorization that left them incurious and averse to education. By the 21st century, though, school has expanded beyond a vehicle for toga parties, and “student” has become a near-universal stage of adolescence. In The Student, Michael Roth tracks the different modes of learning that constitute the modern student and celebrates the perpetual learner—one who continues to pursue enlightenment and, unlike John Belushi, emerges from their self-incurred immaturity. At only 200 pages, The Student is far from a comprehensive history. Rather, it surveys a variety of practices, teasing out the ways students have developed independence and, ideally, freedom.
Roth begins by examining the students of three historical teachers and the examples they set for the modern pupil. Confucius’ followers cultivated virtue in turbulent times; Socrates’ interlocutors dispelled sophisms through ironic critique; and Jesus’ disciples sought rebirth through piety to their teacher’s truths. For Roth, each of these modes is essential for the student, though none should be adopted to the exclusion of the others: Roth rejects Socrates’ bottomless irony, for example, in favor of “critical feeling,” the empathy to understand why an unsympathetic idea would resonate in its own time and context.
Skipping to premodern Europe, Roth explores how apprenticeships developed youth independence. Across much of the continent, with literacy scarce and books inaccessible to all but the privileged and the clergy, these vocational relationships were the most common form of study. Students would provide labor for their masters in exchange for access to a trade, but they would also receive a moral education, and follow behavioral prohibitions against indecency and romance. Autonomy from their parents, paired with new skills and norms, would allow them to exist independently within their communities. Even failed apprentices made use of their training: Roth highlights how Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau each carried the discursive habits of their trades into their writings on independence and freedom. (Karl Marx does not appear in the text, but he agreed with Roth on the importance of work as pedagogy; he opposed the Gotha Program’s ban on child labor because “an early combination of productive labor with education is one of the most potent means for the transformation of present-day society.”)
However, autonomy was not sufficient for truly free thought. Roth notes how Kant’s What is Enlightenment? saluted the independent learners who, in the spirit of the age, dared to stand on their own reason. Decades earlier, the philosopher John Locke and historian Charles Rollin had each emphasized education as a means of developing moral fortitude, and the Encyclopédistes’s project brought scientific knowledge to the public at scale. In Kant’s time, though, education remained mired in tradition, and universities mostly emphasized memorization over knowledge creation. This began to change in part due to Rousseau’s treatise Emile, which promoted a “child-centered” education, allowing students to cultivate their passions and capacities. In Prussia, the university was reoriented to weave teaching and research together under the protection of a novel academic freedom. As the aims of education shifted, so too did the student: through Bildung, the process of self-cultivation, they would determine their own paths and freedoms.
Liberalized curriculums did not entail inclusivity, though. The early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft criticized Rousseau’s dismissal of women in Emile: in her Vindications of the Rights of Women, she argued the importance of female education for societal wellbeing. Roth traces how W. E. B. du Bois made a similar argument for Black students throughout and beyond his education, from an H.B.C.U. to Harvard and Humboldt University. Both used the language of freedom to demand space as students, though their demands would not be fully met in either’s lifetime.
Roth acknowledges, though, that students cannot be reduced to their struggles for truth and liberty. Along with the development of the student came the development of student culture, from dueling in 19th century Prussia to hazing in the contemporary United States. Student mischief is nothing new—Roth dates the tradition of abusing freshmen to as early as the 1400s at Oxford and Bologna—but fraternities, in Roth’s telling, became the primary means of protecting “college men” and their habits in the 19th century. While education provided a chance at social mobility for poorer students, fraternities and, as women enrolled in the early 20th century, sororities, served to protect societal hierarchies. Many excluded Jewish, Catholic, and Black students while promising post-graduate connections for their pledges. However, Roth claims that the influx of veterans after WWII helped quash these discriminatory practices, as older men, skeptical of fraternity masculinity and having opposed injustice abroad, mixed with their peers. The university and its institutions were no longer just runways for the prospective free; now they were targets for independent student critique.
As the Vietnam War and social upheavals of the 1960s roiled campuses, students, especially groups like Students for a Democratic Society, began to demand more expansive freedoms from the university. Roth describes how they attacked unjust hierarchies, organized against segregation and the war, and forced universities to reform their curricula and admissions systems. As the Summer of Love rolled into several winters of discontent, a few of these students turned to domestic terrorism, but most left radicalism behind and joined the ranks of the swelling professional class. Though the youth culture of the ‘60s was quashed by the realities of the ‘70s, the university as a venue for further expanding freedom was cemented.
Until it arrives at the present day, The Student is a lucid account of the development of its subject. Although Roth mostly limits himself to Western European ideas about learning, the book reads quickly and illuminates the development of freedom through study. However, Roth’s suggestions to promote freedom in today’s education won’t shock readers familiar with the genre.
Roth thinks that college should be more accessible to people from all classes; that intellectual conformity is unhealthy; that economic inequality is bad. He disparages how colleges have become “meritocratic” proving grounds, where learners compete for dream jobs in mergers and acquisitions; he laments how middle- and upper-class parents “opportunity hoard” to ensure that their children, no matter their capabilities, are selected as those meritocrats. (The extent to which his actions as Wesleyan's president reflect these concerns is left as an exercise for the reader.)
It’s uncharitable to fault The Student for its exclusions, given its scope and length; nevertheless, a few absences stuck out. The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, whose 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed was foundational to the field of critical pedagogy, is given only a glancing mention. Freire’s friend and interlocutor, Ivan Illich, is excluded entirely, despite the importance of his work to both New Left radicals and Governor Jerry Brown. The Student is a historical, not theoretical, work, but a brief foray into radical thought would have left the reader with more to chew on. As is, the ending pages on alternatives leave the reader wondering whether freedom is best pursued through tweaks to college admissions and project-based learning.
For students (perennial or otherwise) interested in completing enlightenment, Kant might be more illuminating; for those interested in a bright history of the process, The Student is available at Olin.
This was originally written for the Wesleyan Argus. The published version misrepresents a few of the book's ideas and contains factual errors; above is the original.