I interrupt my “one thing for students to learn” series with a response to a message I had received shortly after I had sent out my last fourth “one thing.”  Well, it’s not really an interruption so much as a pertinent sidebar.

Almost immediately after I put up my last Random Thought, I received a short one line response:  “I still don’t understand why aren’t all your ‘one thing for students to learn’ not focusing on learning content and developing critical thinking skills?”

Once again, I briefly answered, “They are.”  This time I referred this western professor to two short pieces in recent issues of the HBR I had just finished reading that coincidently had insights into a more complete answer.  One was  titled:  “If You’re Not Helping People Develop, You’re Not Management Material.”  In my extrapolation for our campuses, I would suggest we replace “management material” with “teaching material.”  The second is titled, “Does Your Company Make You A Better Person?”  Likewise, I would suggest in this one we replace “company” with “your campus.”  Following the line in both articles, I would suggest that regardless of what anyone expects from professors in and out of the classroom, being an unconditional catalyst of student personal transformation should be a non-negotiable required competency.  Professors should care unconditionally–unconditionally–about each student as a person, caringly offer opportunities for personal growth and transformation, faithfully help each student break negative habits that are controlling and limiting and deafening and blinding her and him to their own abilities and potentials.  After all, although the connections are not always obvious, the research findings tell us that personal change in belief, feeling and attitude are inseparable from achievement.  I always tell students, “If you think you can’t do something, you’re right.  If you think you can do something, you’re right.  Now, which ‘right’ do you want to be?  Let me help you to figure out ways to help you answer that question and to help you find your own right path to follow.”

Yet, after reading some stuff on my university website, I’ve been wondering if so many of us have reduced higher education to two words:  job and tenure?  Have we academics focused too much on our own job security by giving our higher priorities to and putting most of our energies into running in the “publish-or-perish” rat race in order to get what a departmental colleague once called “a guaranteed job for life” at the expense of classroom teaching matters and serving others?  Has “higher” too often come to mean “better paying?” Has “education” too often come to mean only white collar “vocational training” and professional “credentialing?”

What has happened to real personal transformation, to molding hearts as well as minds, to preparing students for living the good life, not just for getting that good job or getting that job for life?  I mean, if we don’t help someone learn how to be a respectable and responsible human being rather than just being responsible for getting a respectable grade to get a respectable job, what’s it all for?  I submit that the purpose of learning is growth, development, transformation of our hearts and spirits as well as of our resumes and wallets.

I would suggest, as the authors of these short articles suggest, that to achieve both goals professors first should expand their purpose from “How can I get each student to achieve?” to “How can I help each student to achieve while helping her or him transform?”  In the spirit of Abraham Maslow, savvy teachers know that doing well on the second part of the last question helps to answer the first question.  In the spirt of Carol Dweck, professors should assume the responsibility of helping students–and themselves–change negative or static mind sets to positive, growth, and dynamic ones.  In the spirit of Ed Deci, the professors should ask themselves: “How can I harness students’ strengths and interests and passions;” “how can I give them autonomy to use those strengths and interests and passions as a way to see what they can do and be;” “how can I give students ownership of what they do rather than slavishly follow “what do you want;” “how can I help them see the purpose of what they do” so they can answer their own question of “why do I have to take….;” “how can I help them see the meaning in what they do that’s beyond the content in order to allow them to better learn both about the content, about themselves, and those around them.”  We should be striving to graduate not just honor students, but honor persons as well.

Louis