The Skillful Teacher

Lost Innocence
Students often come to campus with high hopes. They think that
college will turn their lives around, that now they are going to get
“truth,” and that finally they’ll understand how the world really
works and who they really are. Going to college is viewed as a trans-
formative marker event that’s going to change their lives dramati-
cally for the better by opening up career possibilities and helping
them to self-knowledge. However, this sense of confidence is some-
times eroded almost from the first week as these students hear how
their teachers describe learning. Many professors stress that there
are no right answers and that students will have to discover their
own meanings for themselves. When students ask teachers for the
correct response to a dilemma or question, teachers often reply “It
depends.” These same teachers then go on to say that knowledge
and ideas cannot be understood in starkly dualistic terms, as either
right or wrong. Instead, the world of intellectual inquiry is painted
with the grey shades of ambiguity. Students are told that the pur-
pose of a college education is to get them to ask the right questions,
not to find the right answers.
As students hear all this they sometimes feel cheated, lost, and
confused. Or they just don’t believe it. To them the professor is play-
ing a sophisticated and evasive guessing game, pretending not to
have the answer and testing the students to see if they have the
wherewithal to push him to own up to the truth. When the penny
drops and students realize their teachers mean what they say about
there being no easy answers, universally correct views, or unequiv-
ocally right ways to think, they panic.
This intellectual anxiety attack is a crucial one in students’ auto-
biographies as learners. If they can live through it, they experience
an epistemological transformation. Knowledge and truth become seen
as contextual and open, as constantly created and recreated in a 
community of knowers. Students realize their lives as learners will 
be marked by continual inquiry, questioning of assumptions, and
reframing of perspectives, just as their teachers say. However, if 
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students can’t face this epistemological reframing, they are at a high
risk of dropping out of the whole college experience. Epistemological
panic has been neglected in studies of student attrition which focus
almost exclusively on the exterior details of students’ lives—their
financial difficulties, problems with meeting college schedules, lack
of preparedness for taking responsibility for their own learning, and
so on. These factors are crucial, and their importance should never
be underestimated, but the interior factor of lost innocence should
also not be forgotten.