“I just can’t get over the belt buckles on the hats,” said the student in the front row.

Those funny Puritans, always good for a laugh. They were so quaint in their ways, so fervently unenlightened despite the growing intellectualism of the world around them. Our history professor nicknamed them “the rednecks of the 17th century.”

That was a typical excerpt from the in-class discussion in my spring semester history course. I can’t speak for the rest of my classmates, but leaving the empty classroom after that course (an hour and a half, twice a week) was a troubling experience for me. I felt cheated – as if I’d gone out on opening night to see a movie I’d anticipated for some time, only to sit through 100 minutes of bad acting and worse dialogue, the popcorn stale in my mouth.

I came to college looking for an education that was deeply rooted in the foundations of knowledge. That’s one of the reasons I picked the College of William & Mary – with solid departments in my areas of interest and a reputation for devotion to classical models of education, it was a perfect fit. But my experience at W&M also serves as a clear indication of the deep-rooted philosophical divergence that exists today in the broader argument over the process of education.

The modern American debate over higher education ultimately concerns differences in our understanding of the minds of the students in the classroom. The mind of a student, according to some, must be exposed to a wealth of information from the widest variety of sources through a plethora of teaching methods. The teacher ought to be the source for new concepts and ideas, the classroom a petri dish for the multicultural and pluralist perspectives of our post-modern world.

Yet in some classrooms, we see a different philosophy reflected: the idea that a moral compass must be bequeathed to a student in order to achieve any full education. At many universities today, there are few professors who still responsively reflect that compass – or even acknowledge that it exists.

Indeed, the trickle down decisions of the higher education bureaucracy indicate a marked loathing for the idea. According to educational bureaucrats, the classroom is a forum for Ideas and Learning designed to equip a student to function in today’s marketplace and to decide for themselves what they ought to think of the world they live in.

This steadfast institutional belief can be illustrated easily through the overwhelming growth of “in-class discussion” as the primary method of teaching in the public schoolroom. Today’s professors lecture less and rarely require sophisticated memorization outside of mathematics and hard science classes – instead, a student is often merely asked to come to class “ready to discuss” the required reading.

In the social-science realm, this is tantamount to abdication of any significant philosophical role for the instructor. Students are left free to come to their own conclusions about the world they live in, and the pluralistic classroom’s ideological neutrality is thereby ensured.

What many students have realized (whether they would describe it this way or not) is that this semblance of “philosophical neutrality,” propagated through the shared ideas of a classroom forum, is hardly neutral at all. When a professor informs a student that they should not call communism “evil” merely because it is a “different worldview” than theirs, the professor does not instruct moderated pluralism, but teaches a decidedly ideological view of world history.

The educational bureaucrats and professors have failed to realize a very simple truth – that it is impossible to teach without espousing a philosophy.

Education cannot function as a purely relativistic process. When students learn about the Puritans by arguing in class about the pros and cons of repressive religion, or spend the time mocking buckles and hats, they leave the classroom with a permanently crippled grasp of history. In a learning process where fostering the ideas of the students is more important than the search for knowledge, it is increasingly difficult for the truth to survive the classroom.

But for a busy professor with bigger ideas on his mind, and disinterested students with more important things to do, an in-class discussion was probably the best anyone could hope for. Discussion-based teaching tends to discount the importance of writings on the subject, preferring the often ill-informed sentiments of the student over the commentary of giants in the field. Instead of analyzing commentaries or studying original documents, we discussed “our feelings” about the Puritans in general. Not the real Puritans, mind you – but the backward witch-trial buckle-heads that exist only in the caricatured revisionism of modern cultural ignorance.

The reason I felt cheated in that class was because – and perhaps I am alone in this – I was genuinely interested in learning more about the Puritans. Their philosophical influence still echoes today, in our laws, our culture, and the fundamental structure of our society. The study of their original writings even turns up language that would surely be familiar today – the concepts of the Protestant work ethic, divinely ordained human rights, and a vision of America as a “shining city on a hill” are just a few of the Puritan’s more notable legacies. If my fellow students cared to look closer, the “rednecks of the 17th century” have surprisingly much to offer.

Properly envisioned, education at all levels consists of the search for truth and beauty. The Puritans saw learning as a process of growing closer to God — through the dedicated study of His word. In the hostile climate of England and later the new world, the Puritans kept their faith and their devout attitude towards their religious studies. A response to the Catholic and Anglican separation of the scriptures from the masses, the Puritan mindset was rooted in the Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura, “Scripture Alone” – a view that held the study of original scripture as a way to break down the walls between the student and the truth, between fallen man and Holy God. Without the scriptures, men were lost without any map towards salvation.

Unlike today's professors, the Puritans believed in going to the original source. As Professor Allan Bloom once wrote in his classic book, "The Closing of the American Mind,” the presence of original literature and the words of "dead white men" in the classroom have – liked the scriptures – all but vanished. In too many of today’s college classrooms, those men and the ideas they formed, debated, and sometimes died for are nearly invisible. Modern college students are worse for it, as higher education devolves into a process that ignores the voices of the past and denies the need for a moral compass.

But just because the classroom fails them does not mean they are without hope. Instead, learning and education can be gained the same way the Puritans gained it — by studying the original word, together and individually, regardless of the hostile world around you. Just because you spend less time reading for class doesn't mean you should spend less time reading in general. Study outside of your class-mandated prerogative. Explore ideas and theological debates that you don't hear about in class. And find others who will study with you.

St. Augustine once wrote that you must first know how to read a book before you can read it. All too often in the modern classroom, you can skip both. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. Ultimately, it's your responsibility to decide what you’ll get out of college.