Intellectually-charged environments

I am blessed with a very high-variety undergraduate experience. Professors from all kinds of abstract and concrete fields participate in my education, and as much as I sometimes lack the mental fortitude to take all the information offered to me to heart, I am immensely glad that, in many of these classrooms, I am blissfully stimulated.

Unfortunately, the issue with being fully engaged is rarely the teacher itself, but my own inhibitions. If we trace the root of this academic stumbling block of sorts, I find myself with the need to articulate what I may have finally confirmed to myself as what I will now call an intellectually hostile environment.

An academically hostile environment does not specifically imply rivalries or inter-personality conflict, though these are certainly contributing factors. A more impersonal and egocentric complex is what I consistently see, especially in classrooms of equal intellect level, and especially among talented peers as well as myself. Quite simply, it is the discomfort that results from sharing information or opinions when the pupil in question carries full knowledge of the intellectual ‘competition’ occurring during any kind of forum setting (often a classroom). It is a fear of appearing unworthy or unfitting within the environment itself.

Conversely, an intellectually stable environment would be descriptive of a classroom or social network in which the inhabitants tend to recognize an intellectual-or-otherwise hierarchy. The equal ground of competition is often absent from these environments, and the resulting displacement between those who excel and those that do not often focuses the conceptual classroom upon the material being covered and not the power struggle of individuals. An intellectually impertinent environment, similarly, does not demand an intellectual mode of input, and may instead rely more upon work ethic and other atypical factors to determine social standing. These environments tend also to be more comfortable to all participants.

I suppose the perfect classroom environment, through this formula, would be one that embraces cultural, intellectual, and artistic diversity. A natural pecking order forms, everybody feels satisfied and fulfilled, perhaps. This not to mention the typical notion that diversity already provides large quantities of benefit in the form of additionally-diverse talents and knowledges.

An individualist, supporting an integrated classroom setting? My painful elitist tendencies are setting off gigantic alarm bells. Regardless, I have defined an environment that has plagued me in some situations for the better part of four years. That will suffice for now.