What If Breaking Students to Build Them Back Up Only Breaks Them Down?

“Obedience to Authority: On Being Broken,” an excerpt from Feels Like Trouble by Helen Betya Rubinstein

It was my first class of college, the class I walked across the quad toward on the crisp morning after Labor Day, the empty days of orientation finally over, bell tower clanging out some approximation of a song. Writing the Modern Essay, it was called, which is funny, since Writing the Essay is the name of the course I teach now. We sat in heavy wooden chairs around a tremendous wooden table, all of us on time or early, all of us first-year students, every single one of us the kind of high school student who had wanted to go to Yale and gotten in. We were teacher pleasers and competition winners, elected leaders and admissions-committee-legible achievers, and we believed in the supremacy of our new school—it was why we were here, even if that wasn’t the story we told ourselves, even if some of us had chosen Yale precisely because it wasn’t Harvard. The room was a collective held breath. The walls were paneled in carved wood, the windows too high to see out of...