Educators aren't parents
Spaeth, Robert L.
EDUCATORS AREN'T PARENTS A CONFUSION OF ROLES David O'Brien is troubled. And no wonder. He wants what he can't have. He wants colleges to do what colleges are poorly equipped to do, or to do well,...
...But students are positively eager to talk about love and related matters if they are encouraged to think for themselves without high-powered advice and counsel from their elders...
...Let the power flow from the literature-read Madame Bovary with college students, or Plato's Symposium, or the Gospel of St...
...If O'Brien and other well-meaning faculty members in Catholic colleges would reflect on the purpose of liberal educa-tion and on the qualifications of their faculty colleagues, they would intervene less in students' private lives-and perhaps worry less in the bargain...
...No other institution can do what a liberal art4 college is best suited to do-fill the intellectual prescriptions of young Americans...
...What parts of life could be more personal, less amenable to academic disciplines...
...In short, it will equip the students to think about these problems...
...In short, by providing the best education it can to women as well as men, equally...
...A typical American college student arrives on campus after eighteen years of powerful formation-by family, peers, and television...
...I am not suggesting that David O'Brien, or others like him- and they are numerous-stop worrying altogether...
...The answer to that question flows from the qualifications of the faculty and needs of the students...
...Profes-sors are trained to be educators, not counselors or substitute parents...
...The faculty's expertise lies in intellectual disciplines...
...But unlike most temptations, it ought to be resisted...
...How should that time be best used...
...He wants colleges to do what colleges are poorly equipped to do, or to do well, namely, to guide students in the most intimate aspects of their lives, to shape, as it were, their students' personal destinies...
...And how can a college contribute to the advancement of women...
...O 'Brien deplores the fact that "we have left relationships to take care of themselves...
...but that's close to what we in colleges should do-teach what we know how to teach, and allow the students to take care of their own relation-ships...
...That's the mistake that follows upon the temptation...
...But I do suggest worrying about other matters-about government, poetry, biology, mathematics, music, psychology, history-and conveying to college students that these are worth worrying about...
...John Henry Newman wisely asked: "A hospital heals ajj broken limb or cures a fever...
...ROBERT L. SPAETH...
...Of course, it is tempting to try to shape that student's moral and spiritual life, to send him or her away four years later prepared to face all those challenges every commencement speaker stresses...
...So O'Brien worries: "There remains a continuing chasm between metr and women on concrete issues of relationship and career...
...That's the temptation of the elders of every tribe...
...O'Brien succumbs to that temptation in the area of "relation-ships" between men and women students, the area that includes their love and sex lives, their future marriages, their status relative to one another...
...Ditto for men...
...Any college that tries to do too much, to be too good for its students, to depart from liberal education or go beyond it-such a college can expect to have troubled faculty members...
...what does an institution effect...
...What connection will such an education-a liberal and liberating education-have with the personal problems O'Brien describes...
...And from both sides comes the answer: use the four years to educate the students' intellect, to teach the great world of intellectual possibilities-from economics td theology, from the social to the natural sciences, from history to, philosophy...
...professors are appointed to teach these disciplines to students...
...Colleges usually command their students' attention for only four years...
...No doubt he would like to do something about that, in his capacity as a college professor...
...O'Brien to the contrary notwithstanding, it isn't true that love can't be discussed in college settings-but if a teacher insists on drawing from the students their most intimate and disturbing feelings, the discussion will surely fail...
...Four years are hardly enough and the need is vast...
...Women in college today are far better served by being held to high expectations in philosophy and literature, physics and political science, than by the efforts of the faculty to "prepare" them for the new life of sexual equality...
...John...
...which professes the health, not of the body, not of the soul, but of the intellect...
Vol. 116 • March 1989 • No. 6
