Stop Raising Students in Bubble Wrap

The job is not to handhold them to graduation, but to prepare them for a world that will not.

Students do not arrive in my classroom helpless. They arrive conditioned. Trained to wait. Programmed, politely, to follow instructions like well behaved passengers on a bus they did not choose. Years of color coded syllabi and microscopic grading rubrics have taught them one thing: wait for instructions. Simply put, they’ve learned that learning is something that ‘happens to you’, not something you do for yourself. Then we hand them a diploma, drop them into the economy, and act surprised when they stall at the first unstructured problem.

The research crowd talks about autonomy as if it were a luxury. Dewey argued it was the foundation of real learning, not the decoration on top. He was right, yet business schools still treat it like a side salad. We talk about empowerment, yet design systems that infantilize. We build courses around checklists. We spoon feed, scaffold, double cushion every fall. Then we expect graduates to walk into companies and show initiative. That’s just magical thinking.

In my courses, autonomy is not a slogan. It’s the operating system. I tell students from day one that my job is not to mother them through a degree. It is to teach them how to teach themselves. I don’t want them dependent on me. I want them dangerously capable without me.

So I design around that goal. They get an absurdly rich Notion (ever evolving) library, progressive incentive grading (with bonus points for climbing back up after a fall), and 24/7 assistance via Slack so risk taking is rewarded instead of punished. They get chances to try, fail, rebuild, adjust, and try again. More importantly, they get a teacher who believes in them more fiercely than they expect (sometimes more than they believe in themselves), in their ability to climb without me holding the rope.

But autonomy is not chaos - it has structure. You don’t drop students in the desert with a bottle of water and call it character building. You give them space to roam, but you also give them paths, signals, maps, and the confidence to improvise when the map becomes useless. You build systems that let them learn from mistakes without sinking their entire semester. What matters is giving them a second chance so they are not terrified of the first one.

And here’s the part schools love to ignore. Autonomy has to be learned before the real world hits. Out there, the mistakes have stakes. No extensions. No clearer instructions. No grade curves. Out there, it is unstructured problems, shifting targets, political landmines, and expectations that feel brutally unfair. Out there, nobody cares if you were top thirty percent in your Strategic Management elective. They care if you can figure things out when nothing is explained and everything is blinking red. School is the only environment where you can practice that with training wheels. If we do not teach autonomy inside, students will learn it outside through pain.

Business schools say they prepare students for the real world. Fine. Then let’s stop raising them in bubble wrap. Give them permission to try. Give them space to trip. Give them systems to get up. And most of all, believe in them long before they believe in themselves. Because the Colosseum is coming. And no multiple choice exam is going to save them.