What If We Got It Wrong? Rethinking Student-Centered Education

We’ve been hearing it for years: be student-centered. And I understand. For too long, education was teacher-centered or content-centered, focused on delivery over discovery. The move toward student-centeredness has been meant to correct this by recognizing our students as learners with something to contribute.

But I think we took a wrong turn.

I know that might sound surprising, especially from someone who believes deeply in care, student voice, and relational learning. But stay with me.

Centering the learner still centers someone. And when we make students the focal point, we risk turning education into something consumable and transactional - something designed to please rather than to challenge, to comfort rather than to awaken.

What if, instead, we centered the learning?

In Educative Encounters, I write about what can happen when we lose sight of the learning itself. I’ve seen it across the campuses where I’ve taught and led. When the focus shifts too far in either direction, the learning suffers.

On one end of the spectrum, some instructors hoard power, treating knowledge as something to be dispensed from the front of the room. They don’t learn student names. They don’t listen. They see themselves as the experts and students as vessels to be filled. It’s efficient. But it’s not relational. And it’s not educative.

Others swing the opposite way. In an effort to be student-centered, they relinquish all authority. They hesitate to guide. They avoid offering direction. And in doing so, they sometimes create a vacuum. And we know how vacuums work - someone steps in. Usually not the wisest or most generous voice in the room. And it's also not educative.

Many of us were taught to think in binaries: either the teacher holds the power, or the students do. Either knowledge flows from the front, or it bubbles up from the group. But learning doesn’t work that way.

Martin Buber also pushed back against simplified metaphors. He warned against seeing education as a pump (pulling knowledge from students) or a funnel (pouring it into them). Neither honours the learner. Neither honours the learning. Both miss the point. As Buber puts it, “No real learning takes place unless the pupil participates, but it also means that the pupil must encounter something really ‘other’ than himself before he can learn” (in Friedman, 1976, p. 177).

Parker Palmer offers a vision beyond the binary: a community of truth. In this model, neither the teacher nor the learner is at the center. What we gather around is the “great thing” - a question, an idea, a mystery. Something more important than any one of us. Something worth turning toward, together.

In learning-centered spaces, the focus isn’t on who holds the power. It’s on what we’re creating together. Learning becomes the shared project. Educators design conditions for learning and bring their expertise to bear in ways that invite student voice and insight. The result is a space where learning comes alive.

Being learning-centered doesn’t mean we stop caring about students. It means we care enough not to pander. It means we acknowledge the power dynamics at play, then shape them in ways that are generative rather than limiting. It means we place learning - not the learner or the teacher - at the center of our shared effort.

If we really want to do right by our students, let’s stop making it about them.

Let’s make it about the learning.