Children and Adults

Labor Day fell on the eve of the Jewish New Year, which was a nice chance to reunite with my two college-aged kids who had left for school only a few weeks prior. The younger one is settling in, going to classes, making friends, and participating in sports. But she was happy to eat a home cooked meal, take a long shower, and wash her clothes.

The Talmud (Kiddushin 29) obliges parents, among other things, to teach their children to swim. I read ‘swim’ as a metaphor, and from an early age we made sure they mastered doing laundry, even if we still disagree about separating lights and darks. Our daughter swims on her college team, so we’re covered literally as well.

At least he wasn’t eating them

She told her Mom that a classmate put his clothes in the washer at school and started it before he put the detergent in. Seeing the Tide pods in his hands as the machine filled with water, she said “Well, it’s locked now; you’ll have to re-run it when it finishes.” It made her realize she knows a few useful things already.

This all came to mind as I read an excerpt from Amia Srinivasan’s book about feminism and sex. An Oxford philosophy professor, she argues that campus rules about sexual relations between professors and students miss an important point. Blanket bans may protect universities from liability but Srinivasan notes feminists initially complained that “to deny that women students could consent to sex with their professors …. was infantilizing and moralizing.” Over time the issues have only metastasized. Given the fear and (self)loathing that seem to characterize far too many college campuses these days, it’s no wonder sex is incredibly fraught.

The more significant challenge, Srinivasan says, is that intimacy deforms the teacher’s role: “the pedagogical relationship comes with certain responsibilities beyond the ones we owe one another as persons.” A decade ago, as a Yale grad student, she tried to explain to her colleagues “that it was precisely because pedagogy can be an erotically charged experience that it is harmful to sexualize it.”

What struck me most about her essay was Srinivasan’s more-recent recognition of how young her students were:

As a teacher, I see that my undergraduate students, and in some cases my graduate students, for all their maturity, intelligence and self-directedness, are, in an important sense, still children. I don’t mean this as a claim about their legal or cognitive or moral status. They are perfectly capable of consent, and have the right to determine the course of their lives just as I have the right to determine the course of mine. I simply mean that my students are so very young.

she continues:

There are plenty of people my students’ age, most of them who are not in university and will never be, who are adults in ways that my students simply aren’t. My students’ youthfulness has much to do with the sort of institutions at which I have taught, filled with the sort of young people who have been allowed, by virtue of their class and race, to remain young, even as many of their peers have been required to grow up too quickly.

He didn't say it first

Srinivasan isn’t focused on class and privilege in this essay, but as I am interested in how education forms students’ morals, her observation struck a chord. While it’s easy to beat up on Yale and Oxford for producing the likes of Bill Clinton and Boris Johnson - whip smart and morally adrift, others will note that most of us have no contact with these schools; even if we are among the 40% of Americans who attend college, we’re unlikely to attend an elite school.

On the other hand, popular anger at elites is based, at least in part, on the failure of institutions like these to address moral formation. As the poet Rumi first observed in the 13th century, a fish rots from the head. Kids should know how to do laundry before they move out. But universities that charge upwards of $250,000 for a BA could take a hint from Isaiah and try teach their students to be a “light unto nations.”