So if they don't have the ability, then the fault must lie out there somewhere, among all the usual sources of intellectual mediocrity on and off campus. For educationally valuable conversations do not just happen. The short answer is not very much. In fact, they are, as often as not, part of the problem. Above all, the distribution of power in the standard classroom tacitly but effectively encourages students to keep quiet and anonymous.
Students quickly learn that in the undergraduate classroom the professor is all-powerful.
The professor organizes the curriculum, sets the agenda day by day, controls the delivery of the material, distributes the discussion according to her particular desires, sets and marks the assignments, and has total control over the student's final grade. In most classes the only interactions which really matter are those which take place between the student and the professor. Liberal Arts teachers frequently seek to promote classes full of discussion and tend to measure the success of a class by the extent to which such discussion has taken place. We justify this process by an appeal to the Socratic method, forgetting sometimes that Socratic dialogues, then as now, as often as not take the form of what Thomas Wolfe has called a monologue punctuated by worshipful interruptions. The spatial arrangement itself determines that whatever interaction takes place will have this character.