No.

I think it is fair to say that the main job of most of us is to improve our students’ English language skills. If we sit down to plan how to do so with an open mind, at least some of the best ways that we come up with will not be as student-centred as the things we rejected as not quite as good for said language development. Thinking that student-centred activities teach our students other things they need such as self-sufficiency in language learning might lean us further towards those kinds of activities, but the main focus on student learning must nonetheless remain. (If, however, you think that your job is actually to make classes learner-centred, with learning the language further down the list of priorities, none of this will be relevant to you).

To give just one example, about half of the best activities in Dictation- New Methods, New Possibilities (about 80% of which is viewable on Google Books here) contain new ways of doing teacher-led dictations. It is pairwork dictations that took over the world, but why? It’s certainly not because the teacher-centred activities have no place in the classroom. Could it be because most of the TEFL world has been using the “student-centred = good” shorthand for those intervening 20-odd years?

“Student-centred” is simply a useful generalisation like “low teacher talking time” or “elicit, don’t explain”. You won’t hear a good observer saying that “Your TTT was too high” or “You didn’t elicit enough” nowadays, as all the focus should be on student learning. They might, however, say “The students could have learnt more if they had had more chance to speak”, with “This class are going to be listening to conference talks in England next week” being a perfectly acceptable defence.

Might I now predict the first answer that is popping into your heads and would soon follow in my comments section (if I got any) – “But no one is saying that student-centred is ALWAYS a good thing”. I humbly submit that if you ever use “not student-centred” as a self-standing criticism, that is precisely what you are saying (if not necessarily what you are thinking).