So, with stoic week behind us, how did it go?

I met with the stoically curious students at my college three times over the course of stoic week: The initial Monday, a mid-week meeting on Wednesday, and then a debrief the following Monday at a pub in the city. We had about 10 students for the debrief, about 8 at the initial meeting and only 6 midweek.

What have I learned about sharing stoicism with undergrads? A great deal.

What did I learn about the strengths and weaknesses of my students? Even more.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. This is definitely one of my new annual activities at the college.

I realized after our first session that college students today are quite unaware of what to do with practical versus academic philosophy and thus that explaining the purpose and process of developing a practical philosophy, Stoic or otherwise, probably needs to precede any specific discussions of any one philosophy. It was difficult to get students to understand that if they were committed to living according to any consistent philosophy they would have to be content – initially, at least – to not either be fully convinced or knowledgeable about every aspect of a practical philosophical system before attempting to put it to use. Moreover, my students were reluctant to abandon what one student even explicitly described as “just muddling through responding to thing as they come through trial and error” as though this was obviously a better idea than trying or adopting a consistent philosophy like Stoicism that may rest on some metaphysics that you don’t totally get behind without further reasoning and modification. So, in the future, far more discussion of what is practical philosophy and a philosophy of life and the methodology of approaching developing a philosophy of life will precede my future attempts to participate in Stoic Week with my students.

This same realization also informed me of something else that seems to be going on with a large subset of my students: They are not all that good at critical thinking. It’s clear to me now that our curriculum has not firmly embedded the idea that critical thinking is not the same as being critical. Indeed, critical thinking is far more about Socrates’s advice to live an examined life and to put ones own ideas rather than just the ideas of others to the test.

However, my student’s had a near universal propensity to reject stoicism at the first sign of trouble or discomfort with any aspect of the philosophical system. For instance, we spent the lion’s share of the first session discussing questions such as:

Is the universe really deterministic? Is there a natural purpose to human life to which humanities nature is attempting to reach through flourishing? How do we know one’s ‘nature’ or the ‘nature of man’ in light of a rejection of classical teleology?

…Ugh.

All were surely interesting questions, but hardly able to be seriously addressed via the stoic week materials, and hardly the most important issues if you are “looking for more peace and fulfillment”, “more happiness”, or “more tranquility”, as they all said they were seeking at the beginning of our first session. However, rather than keeping their minds open and allowing this philosophy, about which they had doubts, to guide their actions for a week there was a palpable anxiety about choosing an imperfect philosophy. There was no thought given to the imperfections of their current hodgepodge practical philosophy of ‘muddling through’. They were visibly struck by the suggestion that this philosophy may have deeper issues than some shaky metaphysics.

This anxiety and deep dissatisfaction and ambivalence to social life is another near universal among these students that I hadn’t anticipated. While oft-quoted in clickbait articles and trend-watcher pieces, I was not fully prepared for the degree of competitiveness, anxiety, mistrust, and fear of making a misstep that characterize my millennial students. The thing is that these students are so good at appearing okay, whey then they are very much not okay.

It certainly explains a great deal about what I have been experiencing in the classroom. The Liberal Arts classroom must be a safe space to explore, question, and try on ideas. However my colleagues and I have had an increasingly hard time getting students to play along. I now have a better understanding as to why this is so: It is impossible to do if the students themselves are explicitly or implicitly threatening and competitive with each other. It is even more difficult if there is a norm that any form of ‘telling peers what they are doing is wrong’ is met with ostracism. In essence, my students describe their worlds as a hyper-liberal (almost anarchistic) world where every individual is autonomous, competitive, and entitled to behave, think, and say whatever they want without opposition from peers. To oppose the choices and thoughts of others is a great wrong. Can you imagine trying to run a seminar under that set of norms?

So, true to its purpose, Stoic Week taught me and my students a great deal about ourselves and each other. A subset of three students hope to continue with a stoic reading group, leading me to think a bit more seriously about developing a formal ‘Practical Philosophy of Stoicism’ syllabus. I certainly have some ideas on how to not design such a syllabus after this experience.