Friday, September 10, 2010
'Nother Brick in the Wall
This is going to be a cynical post.
Kitzhaber discusses the long-running problem between college freshman composition professors and high school English teachers, and claims that BOTH types of classes generally have "confusion in purpose, content, and organization; inexpert teaching; poor textbooks." While I agree, I think that an enormous part of the problem has to do with the education that the young person received before college.
I've attached a film preview to a new documentary on the failing American school system. While I don't think that we should place the blame on the shoulders of high school teachers, I do think that students today are worse off than a century ago because of changes made to the way we teach composition.
I think that our nation's departure from literature and elocution has resulted in students who can't read, can't speak, and can't write. Programs have changed for kids to have fun in school so that they stay in school. High school teachers who have been through these newer systems cannot diagram sentences themselves, and many of them spend more time with young adult literature than with the type of literature required for students in college. Most students won't take AP English. Many of my former students have admitted that they passed high school and entered college without ever reading a book.
There are no Quintilians of the high school or middle school. Maybe we shouldn't have removed poetry from the modes of discourse (maybe we should stop being ashamed of the modes of discourse). Instead of approaching students with, "Listen, someday you're going to have write a cover letter, so pay attention!" we should be saying, "Listen, life is communication. Life is learning from other people and then being able to share your own syntheses of experience and insight. So pay attention."
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food talks about how we need to stop focusing on vitamins and fancy new diet plans (or Diet-anything) and go back to way our grandparents and great-grandparents ate. He says if your great-grandma wouldn't recognize that piece of food (e.g. Go-Gurt), don't eat it! Our cocky new scientific theories about WHAT is in a carrot that makes it good for us does not replace eating the carrot. Instead of taking vitamin C tablets, we should eat more oranges.
I think composition programs (starting BEFORE college) need to take this same advice. We need to look back. We can start in the universities by having better secondary education classes and elementary education programs. And we need to have better communication between the teachers of freshman composition and the English Department.
It's a shame that the same problems affecting the teaching of rhetoric haven't changed within the last century. If anything, the composition classroom seems to have declined in effectiveness over the years.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'm not going to lie, that trailer made me cry. I would not say that the public school system is "failing" but it definitely needs A LOT of work. I think the reasons behind the problems are very complex and also very simple. I sometimes wonder if there were more incentives to teach (ie higher paychecks) if we would get better teachers instead of, as is often the case, people that can't get a job anywhere else. Anyway, well done on your blog and I especially liked your comment about telling kids to pay attention in class because "life is communication." So true.
ReplyDeleteThe film that's coming out looks like it may help some people see some of the problems. Indeed, it is sad. Our children are not getting a fair shake. It's our job to help toward creating change, but it's a very challenging thing to do. Perhaps it starts with our teaching our students to be active about education and learning, and then when they have children they'll fight for it and push their children to fight for it. I agree with what you're saying here; but it's far easier to say than to do. The constraints are enormous. A lottery to see if you get to go to a good school or not? How sad is that.
ReplyDeleteAbout diagramming sentences: the real question should be whether they can parse sentences rather than diagram them. Sentence diagramming is an American thing that has never been taught in Great Britain or Canada. (I've not talked to anyone from other Anglophone countries about this, so I can't speak as to them.)
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to argue that the American education system is in good shape, but we need to be careful about focusing on specific differences and declare them the cure. For instance, 50 years ago we openly tracked students as vocational or college-bound and didn't worry about dropouts. Or consider the social, cultural, economic, and technological changes that have taken place such as changes in family structures, sense of community, and access to good paying jobs for which education isn't needed.
Likewise, we need to avoid the myth of a golden age of literacy. Literacy in the sense of reading Literature has always been a leisure activity of the elite.
While I do believe we have foregone some good pedagogical activities and strategies, we need to be careful when turning to the past. Their methods and practices were rooted in a different time and place. For instance, 100 years ago, very few people went to college (and almost all were upper-class men), in fact one didn't need to graduate high school to make a good living. One-hundred years ago, our educational system was premised on the idea that most people didn't need 12 years of education.
And I haven't even touched upon the knowledge explosion over the past 100 years. An educated voter today needs to know about genetic engineering, Islam, Asian and African history, cybernetics, information technology, human impact on ecosystems, the effects of globalization on manufacturing and knowledge work, etc.
Simply put, our educational system must do more in terms of who it serves and what it teaches and must do so for a culture and world that is ever increasingly changing. In many ways, the system is broken. Reform, however, needs to look not just to the past but at how the needs of the future are radically different than the past and present and how the contexts of the past are different than the contexts of today and tomorrow.
John, thanks for the comments. Since posting, I've thought more and more about how it isn't really going back to the past that I want, but moving forward into something that will prepare kids for a globalized world.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, though, I feel like we could harness some of what we've lost over the years as far as education is concerned, and I think that having an emphasis of literature return to the classroom IS a step in the right direction.
You mention that "reading literature has always been a leisure activity of the elite," but I profoundly disagree. Literacy has been the means of movement, and a way for the non-elite (I'm thinking freed slaves like Olaudah Equiano or early feminists like Wollstonecraft or the Bluestockings) to awaken to a sense of themselves and speak out for liberation and justice.
If students can't read, they won't have access to the history of their own people, and they won't be able to appreciate or understand what they have. They won't be able to know about "genetic engineering, Islam, Asian and African history, cybernetics, etc." if they can't read credible articles on these subjects, or if they succumb to the opinions of others blindly because they don't understand rhetoric.
I think you can probably agree that a huge majority of our nation knows little about the list you mention as part of our "knowledge explosion." The knowledge is there, but our students can't, won't, and aren't accessing it. Nobody has shown them yet that they should.
I think that teaching literature is teaching the trading of ideas. My high school taught very few books outside of AP English, and what books they taught were generally young adult fiction (think vampire romances pre-Twilight...yes, they were around fifteen years ago). I think we should look back and require more of our students. I think our school system has been dumbed down.
I may not mean that we need to require sentence-diagramming, but high school teachers should at least know how to use commas themselves (and many of my middle school professors didn't, and many of my former roommates who are now teaching in schools know even less).
But grammar, style, diction--all of that--will only make sense in the context of reading what others have written. I very much disagree that the need for literacy is a myth. Literacy is a power, in the same way that the ability to speak your mind and have somebody else understand it is a power, and our students don't get this.
Missing your most recent post...
ReplyDelete