Imagine that your whereabouts in the world have been commandeered by a devilish spirit who is looking for a bit of fun at your expense. He has received permission from on high (or low) to punish you for giving up so quickly on your New Year’s resolutions, and he looks forward to some good old-fashioned schadenfreude. One evening, he teleports you into a suburban school outside a major metropolis. SUVs are lined up down the street as far as the eye can see. You have materialized with him just outside the doors of the school’s theatre. A din of chatting parents is clearly audible. Befuddled and increasingly nervous, you turn to your impish companion: “What am I doing here?”

His response sends chills down your back. You are the attraction the parents are waiting for. They are here for a back-to-school speech about the purposes of schooling and the value of education, which will serve as an entrée for the principal’s presentation of the school’s mission. You are to deliver this speech now, off the cuff. As sweat beads begin to form, your new least favourite companion decides to up the ante. “You had better make it inspirational!” the devil cackles.

You shudder. What are the purposes of schooling? What is the value of education? What do parents and principals want to hear?

A lightbulb blessedly strikes as you walk onstage. When educators wax poetic about the aims and goals of education, you remember that they almost always say the same thing. They say that education should prepare students to compete in an increasingly complex global job market. It should provide them with the knowledge and skills they need to face the challenges of the twenty-first century and achieve their dreams. It should make them critical thinkers and creative problem-solvers—maybe even help them become “their own boss.” Some intuition coaxes you to circumvent these tired formulas, however. You recall that there is a new phrase in education quickly becoming a go-to inspirational motif. When administrators or teachers really want to emphasize education’s potential, they are increasingly calling it transformative. The new mantra is that education should profoundly change how students see the world—that good teaching does not just add knowledge and skills to students’ preexisting perspective. Good teaching transforms this perspective.

With this kernel of insight, you begin: “Good evening, everyone. Tonight I want to talk to you about how the best kind of education is not merely informative, but transformative.” Heads nod approvingly in the audience, and your devilish taskmaster frowns. This was a well-chosen rhetorical move, and he knows it. But your statement is more than rhetoric; it is backed up by a vast and growing edifice of research. In educational psychology, teachers are being urged to adopt the methods of “transformational teaching” and to create a space for “transformative experiences” in their classrooms. In adult education, “transformative learning theory” has come to define the current research paradigm. Advocates of social justice increasingly couch their consciousness-raising efforts in terms of “transformative pedagogy.” School administrators are encouraged to employ the methods of “transformative school leadership” and to ensure their teachers practice “transformative classroom management.” There are now transformative approaches to everything from assessment design to school disciplinary schemes. And beyond the boundaries of the English-speaking world, the German field of educational research has recently seen a flurry of activity on “transformational educational processes” (transformatorische Bildungsprozesse).

Colleges and universities are following suit. Describing the mission of Harvard College, Dean Rahkesh Khurana writes, “We want to ensure we are providing students a deeply transformative experience—intellectually, socially and personally—that will prepare them for a life of service and leadership.” The T10 Strategic Plan issued by the provost of Tufts University states that “as a student-centered university, we provide the expectations, opportunities, and support for our students to pursue transformational experiences.” At Ohio State University, where I did my PhD work, this idea has become institutional reality in the form of a newly introduced Second-Year Transformational Experience Program (STEP). Similar programs and mission statements are in operation at colleges and universities around the United States and Canada.

With this kind of foundation underfoot, your opening line seems to be on the right track. But right after the last syllables of “transformative” leave your mouth, you feel the sweat beads return. What does it actually mean to transform students in the classroom? Transformation toward what, and from where? How exactly does a transformative approach differ from the older ideals of “formative” education? What kinds of experiences does it require young people to have? Should teachers really have the license to transform? Your taskmaster perks up as you search desperately for your next line. What should you say?

It is right at this point that not only the hypothetical you but also the contemporary discussion of transformative education begins to falter. We are in thrall to the language of transformation. It instantly rallies the human spirit. It promises radical personal growth. It hints at transcendent forces that we’ve all but buried in our pragmatic, I-am-the-prime-mover-of-my-life sort of age. And it taps into one of the most powerful ideologies of consumer life—the endless project of self-invention and reinvention.

But like so much else in this time of upheaval and uncertainty, we are easily seduced by the spectacle of change, losing sight of the moral ground and telos that would give this change meaning—of roots and fruits. The drama of “transformation” sells because it’s vague enough to avoid offence and intriguing enough to woo your approval. It’s also wrapped up with a peculiarly American obsession with choice: When educators formulate programs for “transformative” teaching and learning, they assume with staggering frequency that the endpoint is simply the state of having more life options. Jack Mezirow, the progenitor of the theory of transformative learning, argues that transformative learning environments should “foster learner decision making” and “expand the learner’s range of options” both personal and vocational. To accomplish this task, Mezirow calls for an injection of “disorienting dilemmas” into the pedagogy, experiences designed to disrupt students’ prior life trajectories and open up space for new ones. Educational theorist Andrea English sings a similar tune, stating that transformative learning commences when students’ perceptual horizons are “interrupted,” thrusting them into an “in-between realm of learning” in which they can begin “wandering and exploring choices.” This search is supposed to “make possible new relations to the world and others around us.” To transform, it seems, is to dazzle with possibility.

Of course, no one denies that expanding young peoples’ horizon of “options” is a worthy educational goal—at least so long as they are good options. But it is just this qualification that is so often missing in the hubbub surrounding transformative education. The goal of transformation is left open-ended, unstated, and uncertain, as if we have done our jobs as educators when we increase the sheer number of possible choices available to young people without helping them figure out which ones are actually worth pursuing. Ironically, in leaving these questions unanswered, we do not actually avoid advancing a conception of what the good life entails. On the contrary, we suggest to young people that change for its own sake is itself a worthy modus vivendi. We are setting students on a path of perpetual transformation, making them into people who are always searching for experiences that stretch and strain their prior commitments and who, in the last analysis, lack existential purpose. Such continual up-endings can have an addictive quality, luring us toward nowhere in particular, so long as it is shocking and surprising. In the end, transformation becomes valued precisely because it does not fulfill the timeless human longing for greater wisdom, purpose, and character. Rather it “frees” us from the hard work and moral integrity that are required to achieve these fundamental goods.

This teleological prudery—if I may call it that—plays right into the hands of the existential consumerism that the modern world so forcefully peddles to us. Zygmunt Bauman argues that the practices and ideals of consumption have infiltrated not only our purchasing habits but also our notions of who we are and what we strive for. We now expect to be able to “shop around” for new life opportunities, moving freely from one to the next, settling on none in particular, and permanently keeping our options open.

Bauman was writing these incisive lines right at the turn of the twenty-first century, in 1999. Now twenty-four years later, it seems we have lost touch with the sensibility that led him to express his concerns. Bauman saw in the idea of transformation without a telos another example of “liquid modernity”—his term for the progressive erosion of bedrock principles and traditional social forms as guides to the art of living. In fact, the situation is potentially even more serious. We’ve redefined the spectre of liquid selfhood as a perk of our educational programs.

You’re still on the hook with the now increasingly eager devil. In spite of all the pitfalls we’ve just discussed, you need to find a way to make your speech on transformative education inspiring, and your post-first-sentence pause is beginning to verge on the awkward. Is there still hope for you? Can the speech be salvaged?

Yes. A breakthrough comes when you make a simple but powerful observation: Not all transformations are created equal. Although transformative education is often cached out with the logic of option expansion just described, this is not the only kind of transformation we might experience. In fact, if we reflect on experiences that have actually exerted a transformative effect on our lives, we generally focus on the very opposite of increased options or choices. We speak of the new commitments that the experiences have made possible. Perhaps we took a class in college that opened our eyes to the promises of a new discipline and pointed us toward our calling in life. We might have received a camera for Christmas that jump-started a lifelong passion for photography. Maybe we attended a classical concert that inspired us to take up a musical instrument or immerse ourselves in the intricacies of musical composition. Or, we might have met a person who challenged us to get our addictions under control and learn how to find pleasure in higher things. When we talk about such experiences, we concentrate on the greater sense of purpose, understanding, and meaning that the experience has brought to our lives, not the naked plus sign between it and our prior perspective. In other words, we value our transformations less for the Big Change it effects and more for the New Good that has begun to reshape our lives.

In my view, this observation is the key to understanding how to conduct a transformative education that is truly worth having. Transformative education in its most compelling form points students toward real human goods that inspire them to become better people than they are right now. It increases the richness, depth, and perspicacity of students’ views of themselves and the world around them. It awakens a desire to fill their lives with ever-expanding value and meaning. And it encourages them to pour their hearts into vocations, practices, and ways of life that have proved to be both intrinsically valuable and conducive to human flourishing, in the best cases over millennia. Transformative education is not merely about increasing life options; it should help students wholeheartedly commit to those that are deeply worthwhile.

While these points may seem obvious on some level, we have hardly begun to take their implications seriously in education. In fact, we tend to ridicule them when they confront us. It is a favourite pastime of educational commentators to malign films like Dead Poets Society, Freedom Writers, or Stand and Deliver, in which the struggles and successes of an inspiring teacher are portrayed in dramatic form, admittedly with characteristic Hollywood triumphalism. Critics generally complain that the depictions of these teachers are naive, romanticized, impossible to scale up, or even violently anti-intellectual. Granted, these films are far from perfect. But why do the teachers they depict become so memorable for us? Why do they do so darn well at the box office?

I think it is because these teachers speak to something we all longed for as students. They portray educators who are convinced of the value of their subjects, who try to infect their students with their enthusiasm, and who have a special ability to captivate their students’ attention. They show us teachers who care deeply about their students as individuals and who believe that they can come to love their subjects just as much as they do. They bring us face to face with educators who believe that their disciplines are home to intrinsic goods that can transform their students’ lives and increase their sense of purpose and meaning. In other words, these teachers present a vision—flawed and incomplete though it is—of a transformative education that is truly worth striving for in the classroom.

I was lucky enough to have a physics teacher in high school whom I would place in the pantheon of teachers like Mr. Keating, Mrs. Gruwell, and Mr. Escalante, the teacher protagonists of the films just mentioned. Mr. Kirmani, as I’ll call him, was well-known throughout my high school as someone who inspired admiration and respect in his students, as well as some trepidation. He demanded the best of his students and was not afraid to let them know when they were falling short. When he noticed laziness, he would mutter “Allah” under his breath and shake his head with melodramatic disappointment. When we forgot something obvious or basic, like the magnitude of gravitational acceleration, he would do the same, sometimes adding in a “stupid!” just loud enough so that we could hear him. And when we turned in subpar work, he would hand it back ungraded until it was improved.

Mr. Kirmani’s method was really quite simple, at least when seen from the perspective of adulthood. Mr. Kirmani introduced us to what it means to aspire. We knew deep down that Mr. Kirmani wasn’t expressing any true indignation or anger when he would tease us like this. He simply believed we could become better than we were, and he communicated that to us constantly. One lesson in Mr. Kirmani’s physics class stands out in my memory as being particularly effective in this aspirational sense. The topic was Newton’s second law of motion, and Mr. Kirmani was clearly troubled when he found out that nobody knew what this second law was at the beginning of the class. “None of you know what this law states? How is it possible? It is only one of the governing ideas of everything in our universe. . . . Allah!” Now, on one very common way of viewing things, stating Newton’s second law is his job—he is the physics teacher. But Mr. Kirmani pushed onward with his uncommon approach. “We must know what the second law tells us. Not only so you won’t fail miserably on your AP exam next year, which you will if you do not improve,” he said. “The second law is fundamental to our understanding of how everything from neutron stars to soccer balls move through space, and we’ll need it for almost everything else we do in this class. The problem is that I’m not going to tell you what it is.”

We were all a little shocked by Mr. Kirmani’s statements, and a few of us had the courage to demur. He explained his reasoning for keeping us in the dark like this: “Do you think Newton had the second law of motion to lean on when he was observing the world? No. He had to pay attention to nature like any good physicist. He had to ask difficult questions, difficult because they have to do with things that we are all familiar with, but that we ignore because we are ceaselessly sending text messages to our girlfriends and boyfriends.”

The slight to our texting habits met with some ironic guffaws, but it was Mr. Kirmani’s next move that really caught our attention. Mr. Kirmani reported that the only thing he could do to help us in our “sorry state” was to “lock” us in the elevator. He led the class to the very old, rarely used, very jerky, and quite smelly elevator in our school. He allowed us to bring our notebooks, a stopwatch, and a calculator. No phones were allowed, but in those days they would have been of little help. His only instruction to us was: “Use the scale. Pay attention to what happens to your weight when the elevator stops and starts. You have twenty minutes. Find out what Newton’s second law is.” And then he walked away. We were left to grapple with the task on our own.

I admit it. None of us were able to come up with the famous F = ma, and Mr. Kirmani knew we would hardly be able to succeed. But here’s what was so interesting about Mr. Kirmani’s approach. Mr. Kirmani gave us a hard time about not knowing the material that he was supposed to teach us, and then he set us up for failure. How unfair! No, how aspirational! Mr. Kirmani was fashioning the topic into a project of discovery rather than into a proof of something someone else had already worked out. He framed the activity, which could have easily become perfunctory and uninspired, so that we felt as if we were exploring profound mysteries of the universe in that rickety elevator. Mr. Kirmani’s aim was not for us to derive the second law, but to become physicists in the most important sense of that term—at least for the duration of the class period. For him, being a physicist was about becoming aware of the invisible forces that are constantly pushing and pulling on us, not just sticking numbers into handed-down formulas.

In the final minutes of the lesson, Mr. Kirmani gave the lesson one more unexpected twist. He encouraged us to think about all of the “forces” shaping our lives without our knowing—not just physical forces, but also influences like dysfunctional relationships, bad habits, personal insecurities, or social expectations. We were to list them off together in groups and figure out how we could better understand and combat them in the weeks to come. By some pedagogical alchemy, Mr. Kirmani thus transformed his lesson about physical facts into a reflection on our own characters and lives.

This is what sets transformative teachers apart. They make their classrooms a place for students to try on the selves that each discipline embodies—whether it be in physics, social studies, history, or mathematics. They direct their teaching toward the intrinsic goods of their disciplines—the goods that make our experience richer and more full of wonder once we have done the hard work of attaining them. And they connect their subjects to the common project of living a good human life. The idea isn’t to try to convince students to become physicists, sociologists, historians, or mathematicians in a narrow vocational sense. Rather, it is to recover the notion that we have the fullest kind of life when we can appreciate the value and meaning of these disciplines as far as we possibly can.

What I am suggesting is that education needs to be about more than just preparing young people for success in a fast and changing world. It should be about more than “transformation” for its own sake. It should be about the inspiration that can come through the subject matter of disciplines. Education helps students commit to activities and forms of life that help them and their communities to flourish. In doing so, it fosters relationships between students and their teachers that, when they are cultivated with these ends in view, can become some of the most meaningful relationships we forge in our lives. This is what I understand the core of transformative education to be and the central mission of those teachers who have profoundly influenced us. If a devilish spirit does ever happen to hold our educational ideals to account, I think we’d have a pretty good chance of staving him off by drawing on the examples of teachers like these.