Michael S. Roth, The Student: A History (Yale University Press, 2023).

Michael Roth has written an interesting history of higher education through the lens of “the idea of a student.”  He demonstrates that over time and across diverse places, there have been different ideas about who a student is. In describing the diverse meaning of “student,” Roth seems to gravitate toward Kant’s definition of a student: someone in the process of learning to think for oneself. This definition becomes Roth’s north star for identifying who a true student is. 

I am drawn to Diderot’s definition of the student, even if it is still far too limiting: Diderot’s Encyclopedia defined “to study” as “to strive to become knowledgeable.”  (85) I believe we can amend this definition to better capture the historically diverse experiences of being a student.

I would define a student as a learner situated in a particular relationship to knowledge.

There have been a myriad number of such relationships throughout history and, thus, myriad types of students. These diverse types of students might be found in different times and places but could also coexist within a particular institution. When I look out upon the learners in my seminar or those spanning the lecture hall, what I am seeing are these various types of students simultaneously. 

We might identify ten ideal types of the student:

1. Learner-as-knowledge-acquirer: Some students seek to acquire knowledge and cohere to a teacher in order to acquire that which they do not currently possess. An older cohort of students were taught to memorize knowledge, one method for acquiring it.
2. Learner-as-knowledge-debater: Some students debate knowledge as the followers of Socrates were encouraged to do.
3. Learner-as-knowledge-creator: Those in a seminar setting are expected to read, discuss debate and thereby create knowledge. These students generate knowledge when they invent something novel like a poem.  These students can be said to “construct knowledge:”  “The construction of knowledge through active participation is key to both the traditional discussion session in a great books seminar and the PBL (project-based learning) learning of the technologically enhanced ‘flipped classroom,’ a classroom where you do your homework with a team and watch recorded lectures on your own time.” (169)
4. Learner-as-knowledge-discoverer: as when a student is given the opportunity to engage in research.
5. Learner-as-knowledge-synthesizer: The multidisciplinary student combines knowledge, mashes it up, synthesizes, reconfigures knowledge.
6. Learner-as-knowledge-rehearser: Some students rehearse knowledge as practice for “the real world.” Post-1960s students, for example, moved away from protest and toward a vocational ethos where they sought “to audition for jobs.” (140)
7. Learner-as-knowledge-demonstrator: Some students arrive at university with preexisting knowledge and seek only to have their knowledge affirmed. These are students seeking credentials for prior learning, or who engage in the competency-based model practiced by Western Governors University.
8. Learner-as-knowledge-advocate: Another way of describing this student is the learner-as-activist.
9. Learner-as-knowledge-practitioner: These students practice or apply knowledge as apprentices.
10. Learner-as-knowledge-transcender: Rabindranath Tagore “emphasized that active learning isn’t just about empowering the student to do more or acquire more; it’s also about expanding the student’s capacity for feeling, especially for empathy.” (170) Tagore wished for students to attain something beyond knowledge. 19th century US colleges taught students to develop good character, which could also be said to be beyond knowledge. Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that education “will not just be the absorption of knowledge gathered from inquiry and experiments; it will involve an increased awareness, even cultivation, of the self.  The point of a student’s education will not just be the accumulation of knowledge or even the building of character.  The point will be the transformation of the self.” (104-105)  This relatively small cohort of students are seeking to transcend knowledge. 

We might use the above schematic to write the history of the idea of the student, as Roth has done here.  That history might identify which of these ideal types was the predominant model of the student at any given moment in history. In the 19th century US denominational college, for example, the learner-as-knowledge-acquirer, or knowledge-memorizer could be said to have been the predominant ideal type. Today’s students are largely knowledge-rehearsers.

This schematic might reveal that rather than a neat succession of predominant ideal types at any given historical moment, a collection of these ideal types coexist simultaneously.  Perhaps it is the ratio of the ideal types in these collections of students that changes through time, and describes the particular moment in the history of the idea of the student. We might identify students in today’s universities as a combination of knowledge-rehearsers, knowledge-acquirers,  and knowledge-generators. 

Colleges might aspire to a mix of different student types as a method to determine admissions criteria. Perhaps a college wishes to enroll a cohort of students that are knowledge-affirmers and knowledge-transcenders. A robust enrollment management strategy would be to seek a variety of student ideal types.  Perhaps colleges could differentiate themselves from others on the basis of the ideal type of student they seek.

I wonder if a student is attracted to a major or a discipline on the basis of the relationship to knowledge it encourages? One of my disciplines—history–thrives in a seminar setting, where we encourage students to produce knowledge as an emergent outcome of discussion. Another of my disciplines—design–focuses on the studio, where students learn to apply knowledge. Of course, teaching and learning practices are rarely so uniform. Even within a specific individual class, students might be expected to enact several types: in one class acquiring knowledge, in another class discovering it, in another practicing it.

I wonder if teaching were to be improved, if learning outcomes might be better crafted, were we to take student ideal types into consideration?

Do these student types reflect the predilections of individual learners, or are these expectations enforced by teachers and institutions? “To study with me,” a teacher might announce, “you must be prepared to combine knowledge or practice knowledge.” Do we give students the opportunity to explore the kind of student they are or that they wish to become?  There would be much benefit from a conversation between teachers and students about their expectations concerning their relationship to knowledge.

A singular definition of the student is unhelpful and unnecessarily limiting and might blind us to the great variety of student types who attend our institutions of higher learning.

David J. Staley is a higher education philosopher, strategist, futurist, theorist and designer, and is an Honorary Faculty Fellow in Innovation at CHELIP.  He is the author of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education and the co-author of Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets.