Following this logic, the job of an education is to fill students with correct information and right opinions, which are possessed by the teachers or curricula. Arguments are not to be presented as arguments—since then they are open to questioning—but rather as bedrock truths. Often students are discouraged from speaking—and in some cases I’ve seen, prohibited from doing so—if they aim to challenge the opinion of the teacher, curriculum, or dogma of the Church. In my experience, one of two things happens in these situations. Either certain like-minded students form a cult-like following around certain teachers (since they alone possess the truth) or students grow disinterested and seethe quietly in their seats, as they realize they are being infantilized. Both scenarios expose the unhealthy fruit of an unhealthy pedagogy.

The students’ subjective feelings are not a reason to dismiss them as irredeemable victims of the modern world, but rather the starting point for their journey out of the cave.

Auden claims, perhaps counterintuitively, that a certain amount of distance between teacher and student is necessary to allow the student to approach the truth freely. He posits this as a third way between the “traditional birch” and the “progressive lollipop,” both of which place the teacher’s will at the center of the pedagogy… a sound educational philosophy must treat the students as free human subjects, and orient itself around their growth.

– Mike St. Thomas, Contemplative Pedagogy.