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The Student: A Short History

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From the president of Wesleyan University, an illuminating history of the student, spanning from antiquity to Zoom
 
“[Roth] has a clear vision for what it ought to mean to be a Learn what you love to do, get better at it, and then share it with others.”—David Perry, Washington Post
 
In this sweeping book, Michael S. Roth narrates a vivid and dynamic history of students, exploring some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very different contexts, from the sixth century BCE to the present.
 
Beginning with the followers of Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus and moving to medieval apprentices, students at Enlightenment centers of learning, and learners enrolled in twenty-first-century universities, he explores how students have been followers, interlocutors, disciples, rebels, and children becoming adults. There are many ways to be a student, Roth argues, but at their core is developing the capacity to think for oneself by learning from others, and thereby finding freedom.
 
In an age of machine learning, this book celebrates the student who develops more than mastery, cultivating curiosity, judgment, creativity, and an ability to keep learning beyond formal schooling. Roth shows how the student throughout history has been someone who interacts dynamically with the world, absorbing its lessons and creatively responding to them.

216 pages, Hardcover

Published September 12, 2023

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Michael S. Roth

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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
Profile Image for Reed Schwartz.
156 reviews3 followers
October 30, 2023
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.
Profile Image for Lukas.
42 reviews5 followers
January 6, 2024
This outstanding book is highly recommendable to anyone.

Roth first highlights three pivotal teachers and their students: Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. Confucius highlighted the importance of cultivating virtues to create harmony in society and across generations. Socrates highlighted the importance of awareness of one's own ignorance and developing ideas in discussion. Jesus asked students to follow him and change their ways in the process.

Roth then takes us through the evolution of what it has meant to be a student from medieval Europe to the modern college campus. Initially, learning was focused on acquiring specific skills in a trade that would make a person economically independent. During the Renaissance, learning became broader and, partly driven by the Protestant Reformation, students were to read the Bible and learn to control themselves despite their "sinful inclinations." Universities developed from places where students would study ideas and interpretations from individual scholars to institutions that taught students more broadly to think for themselves. Humboldt designed the German research university that, for the first time, merged research and teaching. Most of today's college campuses follow this blueprint, but competition is at the center of the learning process--a relatively new development in this from.

I believe that Roth's key achievement lies in what he excludes. He sets the ambitious goal to write a *short* history of being a student; providing a complete history would clearly not be feasible. The book captivates by focusing on pivotal figures and paradigms shaping the student experience from 500 BC to the present. Roth provides an engaging narrative, making the book an unputdownable read. The book has important omissions by design but it has sparked my interest in continuing to read about what it has meant to be a student throughout the most different contexts.
Profile Image for Nazmiye Gül.
70 reviews2 followers
January 31, 2025
Such a well-written mini history about being a student. Especially the things about Confucius, Socrates and Jesus were so eye-opening. I mean, can you imagine being a student of theirs? Because this book is giving powerful insights about their theories and especially their teacherships. And when you read those pages, you can not escape dreaming of yourself sitting in front of the seats of their sights ahead. And the concept of from the theory of Confucius is new and fresh to me so very much. I’ll definitely check more about it later.
And the things about fraternities and sororities were striking. I knew a little bit about them but this is the first time I read about these clubs in an apple pie order.
The history and anecdotes are so well intertwined in the book of .
I highly recommend this book to all scholars and students of today's modern world.
Profile Image for David Goh.
177 reviews2 followers
January 2, 2025
Simultaneously the most boring and most eye opening non fiction book experience of 2024.

A significant portion of this book is a commentary on student-hood in the contemporary American college context. In order to show us how ideas of "student-hood" have evolved in modernity, Roth must first convince us that there are different ways to conceptualize a student. He sets out to do this with a dry but illustrative Chapter 2: when we juxtapose Confucius, Socrates and Jesus, it's clear that their students were not the same kind of student.

Chapter 3 is where it all sort of dies. The early, Medieval concept of student-hood, Roth says, is really just child-hood: the period of one's life where you're a mini-person learning to be an independent economic unit like your parents (more like father) are. Then enter the philosophers to revolutionize education: Kant with his education = enlightenment and freedom from ignorance and slavery due to ignorance, Humboldt, Hart, Ralph Waldo Emerson, et cetera. I list the others without their comments because I can't even keep track!

By the beginning of Chapter 4, we've arrived at a preliminary conclusion that an education hopes to produce an able thinker, independent of any one particular rote school of thought. While Ch 4 opens with the compelling story of WEB Du Bois, it appears completely irrelevant to the rest of the chapter's focus on the evolution of campus life: frats, societies, anti-establishment sentiment, and finally student activism with the Vietnam War.

The single unifying thread? Students are rebellious, and that energy can be a force for good or ill, which is the part that students, ironically, do not seem to be able to decide. This then becomes the subject of Chapter 5: alongside Horace Mann, John Dewey and Allen Bloom, we gingerly consider whether many anti-establishment aspects of college culture, from complaining about faculty, or the higher ed, or even some forms of activism really is intellectual conformism to the in-group after all. Music that was listened to in protest in the 60s is just pop music, an escape from the encroaching career-focused grindset culture of the 70s.

I felt particularly called out by two salient examples: 1. Us kids had/have the image of the perfect body and work at it really hard, but have no image of the perfect soul– we don't even think it exists! 2. We no longer engage with the works of great thinkers, because we just want niche employable skills to survive the ailing economy. Apparently, both have been acceleratingly true since the 70s. Damnit, only now do I see the use for a Common Core!

Bottomline: it would seem that a college education now facilitates a loss of agency rather than a gaining of one.

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This book taught me the importance of studying history. Learning about the different perspectives on student hood led me to recognize where I have subscribed to each in various stages of my college experience. It's humbled me to understand that if I don't get exposed to alternative perspectives, I often do not (cannot?) acknowledge the narrowness of my own, even when I am quick to profile others! It's also made me thankful not to be hunkered down in one of the sad philosophies like the preppy "college is about networking for future job success and recommendation letters" and the mercenary "consulting for two years" bandwagon. If anything, I think the core of my own view is that my learning should impact how I live, even (and especially if) Computer Architecture doesn't resemble thrifting choices at first glance!

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When Roth laments that education is increasingly privatized and now a cutthroat competition for commoditized credentials, I grow curious about solutions. What sorts of revolution are required for a society to "break out" of "late-stage"-anything? Roth could be holding out on us in this regard, given how hard it is to propose a solution; look no further than my post on Frank Bruni for a valiant but unfortunate attempt.
83 reviews1 follower
February 22, 2025
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Profile Image for Laura.
547 reviews
January 14, 2024
I savored this fresh perspective on how our notions of what it means to be a student have developed across time. The book is really well-written and balanced; it shines new light on old issues of curricula, pedagogy and, of course, the student experience. I also appreciate the careful curation in this book. The author chooses the important stuff and elaborates, achieving depth where other books either gloss over points or include arcane details that are not needed.
Profile Image for Amit Sharma.
68 reviews
February 17, 2024
While being a short historical account of the evolution of a typical student or what it means to be one, it is also quite engaging and fluid to read. I felt that the takeaways from the book were higher than most of the books I picked up when trying to learn more about a certain topic. It could have been nice to explore more examples from different cultures and their education system but then again it wouldn't have been a "short" history.
Profile Image for Kyle Berry.
100 reviews1 follower
August 1, 2024
A survey class on the history of being a student in various times and places throughout the world. A little dry and academic, but not without some interesting notes and observations. I'm glad I read it and imagine I will refer to it from time to time.
Profile Image for Evans.
63 reviews1 follower
March 26, 2024
Recommend reading for all teachers & parents of secondary school & university students. Context is sometimes, everything.
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