There was a time in my career when I had little interaction with students. I simply pontificated, passing down the received wisdom of the ages. The history of philosophy is full of this -- men laying down some line of analysis and then departing, never waiting to hear the reaction. Socrates was actually quite unusual in his insistence on dialogue. Traditionally, students passively read all the stuff and then regurgitated it to their professors on tests, what radical pedagogist Paolo Freire calls the "banking" system of education, teachers making "deposits" and then "withdrawing" the information.

I remember that kind of education well. My philosophy professors dutifully plowed through the canon in old wooden classrooms while we sat in tight rows and copied it all down. The smell of the aging desks is still in my memory. Sure, I learned a lot of information. A stack of notebooks two feet high in the barn attests to the number of "banking" transactions. I had a very positive balance; nobody becomes a teacher without one.

But the notion that any of this stuff related to my life or that I could construct a philosophy from this legacy escaped me for years. The old men who droned on, either standing like beacons of absolute truth from the lectern or lying dead on the pages of my books, offered me little help because I didn't really know how to use them. They all seemed to be parading a slender knowledge and calling it wisdom.

I taught that way myself for the first few years, sending students on their way with little piles of received insight. The dead were passing their death on to the next generation. After I got sick of it, I gradually developed other methods and turned the whole business on its head. The interaction between professor and students became the raison d'être and the course content merely a vehicle to facilitate it. Like so many other college professors in the early '70s, I went too far in that direction. We all ended up feeling good about ourselves, but my students banked little factual knowledge. The last few years of my career have been marked by various attempts to achieve balance, with varying degrees of success.

Now I want my students to participate actively in a dialogue that generates self-scrutiny in the best sense of the word. I'm not convinced that I know how to do that anymore, which is part of the reason why I am quitting. But I know I can never go back to acting the part of the grand elder who expects the young to sit at my feet while I intone eternal verities. Far better, I think, to admit them into my own process of thinking so that they can see ideas in living form: embodied, evolving, edged in ambiguity. Then if they work on their own thinking, their convictions can grow out of their doubts. What better way to pay homage to Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche and the rest of the gang? The old authoritarian voice in me is almost mute, unless it confronts a particularly egregious procedural violation.

When I blew the whistle on them a week ago, I didn't know exactly what I was doing. They could have walked out or sat mute, for all I knew. It might have been even better if somebody had grabbed my whistle and said, "Listen, asshole, what gives you the right to end this class? Now, where were we, discussing Galileo? Why do you think the church was so threatened by this guy?" Nobody did, of course. The room to maneuver within the confines of institutions is always greater than most people know.

Today I gave them a set of alternatives, including continuing as before, continuing in a slightly modified fashion and "radical surgery," which meant substituting a formal class with independent study and small learning groups. None of them showed up with a proposal, so we voted on mine. They voted to continue in a slightly modified fashion, with a bit more guidance from me in interpreting the reading, but with student moderators and student questions on the reading as the basis for dialogue.

I was mildly disappointed that they didn't opt to careen into the dark, but it felt good that people were re-committed to the class. At least we were alive. Our struggle, though attenuated by their culturally induced passivity, took us to another level of reality, one in which issues of freedom, authority, justice, truth and questioning itself had real consequences and weren't just atavistic exercises in futility.

At least I hope that's what happened.

Cindra came by my office the next day. She said, "You set the whole thing up, didn't you, deliberately to get us to confront the issues of freedom and determinism. How many of them do you think got it?" She was pleased with herself and with me.

I smiled as knowingly as I could.