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On my way home from work the other day, I was listening to the most recent episode of everybody’s favorite public radio show, This American Life (#402 – Save the Day), and a story about an long-running annual event at a small liberal arts school, stuck with me.

Each year, the school hosts what it calls the “Life-Raft Debate.” The premise of the debate is that there’s been some sort of global apocalypse, and all the students watching the proceedings in the auditorium are the only survivors, floating in a life-raft with just one seat left. The debate pits six professors, each from a different academic discipline, against each other as they argue why someone with knowledge of their field would be the most valuable as they begin a new civilization, thus deserving the last seat.

Now, depending on your opinion of philosophical debate, this may or may not sound interesting (I think it’s a cool concept), but as the years passed, the debate became less about intellectual arguments, and more about making the students laugh.

I think this is a good example of what’s wrong with our education system today. Teachers have become convinced that they can’t challenge their students to understand an intelligent argument or produce intelligent arguments themselves. I’m not saying this is all on the teachers — certainly parents complaining about teachers being too critical and students feeling entitled to A’s played a part, but it needs to change. It has lead to a generation of students and young professionals that has never been forced to address its flaws.

One of the professors interviewed for the piece offered his perspective on the situation:

“As of the 90s, everybody was so frickin’ concerned with everybody’s self-esteem, that it was very hard to just actually come out and say something that everybody knew was true but it would have been perceived as being impolite. It became very hard or unusual if you actually said ‘This is a bad argument,’ to a student on a paper. And you would think that students who have been brought up being told they’re special all the time, this is everybody who talks about, you know, the Millennials as the generation that were brought up being told they’re special all the time, would be these fragile narcissists who would collapse at the instant that they got some real criticism. But what I’ve found is that they’re quite robust.”

The last two sentences are what’s important here. We Millennials may be guilty of putting in the least amount of effort we could in order to succeed in school (I know I was guilty at times), but we are NOT fragile. The real problem is that the epidemic of grade inflation that has permeated the education system has made the vast majority of students complacent. If a 3.0 is seen as an acceptable GPA for a student and he only has to work 30 minutes per day to earn it, he’s not likely to do anything more. We need teachers to require kids to put in some serious effort to achieve the minimally acceptable levels. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes down to it, students want to be pushed. If you tell us how we can do better and challenge us to do the best we can, we will.

Ask just about any former student who his favorite college professor was. It won’t be the professor who passed out completed study guides before the tests and didn’t have an attendance policy. It WILL be the professor who challenged him intellectually in the most engaging way. My favorite professors were always the ones who returned my papers with the most red ink on them. I didn’t always love the grades they gave me, but I always appreciated that they took the time to actually read my work closely and showed me how I could do better.

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