A student walking ahead of me on my trek across campus strategizes on a call with a friend about how to cheat on an exam. “The proctoring makes it so hard to look at my phone! I’m pretty sure I did terrible. I’m gonna have to figure out something else. And the next exam is in just three weeks. Do you know anyone who’s figured this out?”
A student comes into class after a weekend when he was allegedly attending a friend’s funeral back home. After he checks in about what he missed, I say, “And I’m so sorry about your friend.” He snorts a laugh, composes his face, and says “Oh yeah, thanks.”
Students are chatting in the minutes before class starts, and one says, “It’s Gia’s birthday!” We all ring out a chorus of “Happy birthday, Gia!” Gia, one of my best students this semester, groans, “I need to write to my professor for my afternoon class that my parents are flying in, so I’m not going to be able to make it.”
“Oh how nice!” I say.
“They aren’t actually flying in,” she replies.
“Then why don’t you just say you’re going to skip class because it’s your birthday? You don’t have to lie.”
She gives me a skeptical look, and proceeds to draft the email to her other professor lying about why she’s skipping class.
• • •
I teach academic writing at a private university in Florida that has a reputation for offering a perpetual spring break experience. Take one look at the palm-tree-lined pool complex and you’ll get a sense of the brand. I recognize — hope, at least — that our university is not typical of higher education in the US. But beyond all the partying and entitlement, it's the culture of deception I experience here on a day-to-day basis that has made me increasingly concerned about how my students view their fellow humans.
As I try to come to terms with my students’ dishonesty, I have been thinking a lot about an education class I took during my undergraduate years at a small Christian liberal arts college. While I was in that course, I had two significant experiences: First, I saw Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” music video for the first time. Second, I learned about Martin Buber’s I–Thou framework.
Buber first: I’m pretty sure that our class learned about Buber in the context of a pedagogical theorist, probably Parker Palmer. (My apologies to Dr. Loomis that I don’t remember more!) But the distinction between encountering others as “Thous” — holy, immeasurably valuable, irreducible beings that transcend subject-object relations — versus “its” — objects in relation to the experiencing subject/self – stuck with me in a big way.
Buber suggests that we see life through the lens of encounters. Most encounters occur in the realm of “I-It.” They are often transactional and have to do with the way that we reduce or simplify others to their parts, making them easier to cognitively grasp (e.g., we might think of a lady with curly hair and green glasses) and easier to perceive as means to meet our needs. This is a practical necessity: my husband and I do have to make sure that everyone in our household is fed, for instance, and so we interact with each other in part as vehicles for planning, prepping, and executing meals. Buber explains that this is not inherently bad, and that all of us live most of our lives in this realm of I-It relations.
What Buber cautions against, though, is experiencing the world only through I-It encounters: they need to be balanced with the I-Thou. In contrast to the I-It, I-Thou can operate at three levels: between a human and the Ultimate Thou (God, for Buber), between two humans, or between a human and other creatures or objects in the world. The I-Thou is a meeting of two whole subjects with no object. It’s a spiritual meeting, a meeting of mutual affirmation that allows a way out of the deterministic tyranny of an exclusively I-It world or life. Unlike with the examples of menu planning or identifying that lady as the one with the green glasses, I-Thou encounters can’t really be described, because of the inherently reductive nature of language.
So now we come back to Pink Floyd: The image of “I–it” that was burned into my mind as a twenty-year-old education student came from “Another Brick in the Wall.” In this disturbing video, children are conveyed through an educational industrial complex (that looks remarkably like a meat processing plant) while droning the refrain, “We don’t need no education.” The children shuffle in orderly lines, have their faces melted into featureless masks as they sit at their desks, and meet a gruesome end. The kids are treated as objects by a system that wears away at their individuality and refuses to recognize that they deserve anything better.
"Another Brick in the Wall" illuminates Buber's framework as it relates to education on multiple levels. One on level, we’re confronted by the teachers’ relationships with students, which so easily become transactional. Contemporary discourse bemoans how these relationships are structured by metrics that may or may not be tied to actual learning. I think that my education class was largely focused on trying to get us to understand the significance of the teacher-student relationship as we would experience and be able to influence it, maintaining a sense of our students as profoundly complex individuals rather than test scores.
But no matter how intentional an educator is, their classroom dynamic is, of course, embedded in a larger system — a system often more akin to Pink Floyd’s horror scenes than the meaningful interactions of Buber’s I-Thou framework. “Another Brick in the Wall” portrays school as a factory, ruled by the clock and by a logic of uniformity, the supercilious teacher doing his worst under the placid gaze of a young Queen Elizabeth II. This idea that our Western models of education dampen the individual spirit in the service of feeding an economic machine is not a new one — it’s partly the point of such systems.
I suspect, to return to the struggles I see in my own classes, that many students have internalized the emphasis on education as a pathway toward economic gain to such a degree that it fuels a carelessness about honesty and integrity. When the only things in my classes that matter to my students are the GPAs on their resume and maybe a couple of recommendation letters, it is hard to see why the journey to get there matters. The relationships between them and myself, or between them and the subjects we’re studying together, exists entirely on the transactional I-It plane. This seems especially true in my general education writing classes, in which many students seem to think that they may as well farm out their work to Generative AI, which they assume will get results that are just as good as anything they could come up with. They aren’t planning to spend their lives writing essays, so they’re better off spending their class time day trading, becoming a sports bookie, or reselling sneakers (all real examples).
This is a big part of what I personally find so disheartening: many of my students seem perfectly willing to let themselves become the uniform chum spit out by the economic machine. They themselves can’t say where their own ideas start and end, as they’re often immediately heavily edited — shoved into molds a la “Another Brick in the Wall” — by the AI built into their word processors. Many of them blithely jump onto the sausage-making conveyor belt, and then through their lies and deceit, end up pushing away anyone who tries to help them off. But of course, this isn’t their fault. At least, it’s not solely their fault.
I’d lay much of the blame at the door of the instrumentalizing systems of education that have long operated solely by the logic of I-It encounters. But what is so sad to me is that the transactional nature of my students’ approach to school has enormous implications far beyond their engagement with my course learning outcomes: they seem to be becoming people who do not care very much about their responsibilities to others, whether teachers, fellow students, or writers whose works they’re referencing.
Against this bleak landscape, I see the vocational good in bringing the love of God to my students in ways that resist the transactional mindset they’ve become accustomed to: I offer forgiveness. I seek to model that honesty is possible and to build trust through practicing integrity, especially by owning and apologizing when I make mistakes, which I do frequently. And of course, I take every opportunity to celebrate the idiosyncratic and inventive ideas and turns of phrase they produce as individuals, and in so doing, maybe to hold space for the possibility of I-Thou encounters in the classroom.
I cling to such hopes imperfectly, though. In a piece that will be coming out next week, I lament how, along with my students, albeit in different ways, I, too, find myself conforming to the broken systems in which I teach. And I’ll have a piece after that exploring how the serenity prayer has given me a framework for thinking about hitting my vocational limits.
But until then, I’m curious what others think about this connection between the transactional nature of much of higher education and a propensity to lie. Have you recognized a culture of deception in your institution? What resources have you found in your faith or faith communities to help address this?
Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on StockSnap
