At the start of every new academic year, Beloit College releases a "mindset list" for the incoming class of students: a brief compendium of facts and experiences that first-year college students are typically too young to know about firsthand. It's a project undertaken with a sense of humor (for instance, item #35 on this year's list is "They cannot identify the last United States President to throw-up on a Japanese prime minister") and seemingly the best of intentions. Ideally, it functions as a pointed reminder to those of us working on the other side of the desk that many of our cultural and historical points of reference are completely unshared by the people we're teaching.

The good intentions behind the Beloit list notwithstanding, seeing the list circulate every year never fails to disturb me as, more often than not, it seems to be taken up in ways that don't lead to productive self-reflexivity on the part of instructors (e.g., "maybe I need to find a more contemporary example of bigotry in popular culture than Archie Bunker") as much as they feed into condescending sneers about "kids these days" and how little they (allegedly) know about the world around them. And while it may help that this year Beloit has added a companion list of things "that only a child of the ‘80s can explain," I don't think it's enough simply to point out (as the second list implicitly does) that generational ignorance cuts both ways.

In the end, I think the real problem here isn't the list itself as much as it's the way that the list feeds into the all-too-common habit among educators -- from graduate teaching assistants on up to full professors -- to see their students as children, rather than adults. To be sure, this isn't just a cultural studies issue -- instructors of all types and stripes, after all, fall into this trap -- and so my polemic here shouldn't be taken as an attempt to point out some inherent flaw in the way that cultural studies folks, in particular, go about their business. Nevertheless, I think that if cultural studies is going to take questions of pedagogy and education as seriously as it claims to (or, at least, as it claims that it should do), then this is an issue we need to face more directly.

In theory, this should be an easy -- perhaps even trivial -- trick to pull off. All we need to do is to make sure that we think about, talk about, and treat our students as adults. Not "kids." Not "children." Not "youngsters." Not "boys" or "girls." Adults. In practice, however, I've noticed that even teachers who have a sincere dedication to active learning and/or critical pedagogy -- teachers who consciously strive to make their classrooms into spaces where students and teachers can work and learn together in an atmosphere of mutual respect -- often have a hard time with this. The mindset that places those of us who teach college-level classes in the "adult" position while simultaneously positioning the people who take those classes as "children" is incredibly pervasive and persistent. For those of you who've taught at the college level, think for a moment about the conversations that you've had with other teachers about your classes: how often are they peppered with comments along the lines of "My kids were so good in their discussion groups today" or "He's generally a smart kid, but he needs to show up for class more often"? Of course, your mileage may vary, but I suspect that, for most of you, such statements are relatively common features of the meta-discourse surrounding the teaching that takes place at your institution: even if you don't say such things yourself, it's a good bet that you've got colleagues down the hall who do.

Part of what I want to argue here is that we need to recognize that this mindset is a form of prejudicial thinking that alienates our students from us before they even set foot in our classrooms. Nor does it change the end result significantly if we simply manage to limit our use of infantilizing language to contexts where our students will never hear us, as the generic ways that we think about them inevitably color the way we frame our classes, the expectations we have for how they'll behave and perform, and the ways we interact with them. And while I think the vision of students-as-children is a problem regardless of who's invoking it, I find it especially disturbing coming from scholars and educators (such as those of us who do cultural studies of one brand or another) who are otherwise sensitive to questions of language and labels when it comes to issues of race, gender, orientation, class, religion, and so on.

So why is this a problem? I could provide a host of reasons but, in the interests of space, let me limit myself here to four. First, thinking of our students as children misrecognizes who and what they are. For in virtually every legal sense of the term that matters (at least in the US), our students are adults: even those fresh out of high school are old enough to marry, to vote, to hold a full-time job, to join the military, to get credit in their own name, etc. To be sure, not all of our students demonstrate the maturity or responsibility that typically signifies adulthood -- but the same can also be said of many people well past the age of majority (including some of the very teachers who insist that their students are "kids"). Age does not automatically confer maturity on a person, nor does youthfulness automatically mean that maturity is missing.

Second, thinking of our students as children denies those students who are still growing into the maturity and responsibility of adulthood (and there are always some of these) the opportunity to do so. In at least one fundamental respect, "acting like an adult" is very much like writing, creativity, critical thinking, and any number of other things we may want our students to learn in our classrooms: i.e., it's not something most people can or will learn in the absence of opportunities to practice such behavior. And when we persist in thinking of our students as kids, it's more than likely that we will treat them like kids . . . and that they will live down to our low expectations of them and behave like kids. At best, in such a learning environment, if they actually learn to act like adults, it will be in spite of us, rather than because of us.

Third, thinking of our students as children implicitly absolves them of the need to take responsibility for their lives and their education. Responsibility, after all, is a central characteristic of adulthood, not childhood. And treating our students like children encourages them to see their role in the learning process as no different from what it all too often was when they were in grade school: i.e., the teacher is The adult authority figure in the room, and the students are ignorant children who need spoon-feeding and hand-holding to work their way through material in which they have no intrinsic investment. Well, the university is not simply an over-sized second grade. Or at least it shouldn't be. But when we treat our students as children, we're inviting -- and even encouraging -- them to act as if it is.

Fourth, and finally, thinking of our students as children makes it too easy for us to forget that, eventually, they will leave school and get on with the rest of their lives. Some of them will go on to be legislators, administrators, and policymakers. All of them will go on to be taxpayers and (at least potentially) voters. Which means that they will all play some sort of role in the future of public education. And we need to ask ourselves, when the undergraduates in our classes move on to such positions later in life and start shaping educational policy or voting on educational tax referendums: do we want their memories of higher education to be colored by anger and resentment at being treated like children? or would we rather that they remember college as a respectful and nurturing environment where their instructors actually supported them in their efforts to grow and learn and mature? I know which of those choices I'd make -- how about you?