Our Ms. Brooks

I'd hoped that my switch to early hours (not my idea!) would enable me to get more done in the the afternoons and evenings. No such luck. I have been reading, but not writing. (On the other hand, I'm told that Blogger had a li'l' crisis yesterday, so even if I'd posted something it might have disappeared for a while. But I haven't posted anything since Tuesday anyway.)

There was a really fatuous essay on Salon this past Tuesday that I've been meaning to address. It was titled "Death to High School English" (and I realize that the titles aren't the work of the writers), with the subhead, "My college students don't understand commas, far less how to write an essay. Is it time to rethink how we teach?" Well, rethinking how we teach might not be such a bad idea. But "we" also need to think accurately about what the problem is.

The author, one Kim Brooks, reports that high school English classes were a boon to her, possibly saving her from hard drugs and "Young Life Chapters," whatever those are.

Only now, a decade and a half later, after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I've begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.

"The creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write." That set off alarms for me.

For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

It's true that Ms. Brooks wouldn't have learned in high school English what she needed to know about this. Let me help. College students' lack of "basic skills" are not a concern only for the current generation. I've long liked this quotation I found in Gerald Bracey's Final Exam (Bloomington IN: TECHNOS Press, 1995), page 219f:

In 1880, when few people were in school, Shakespearean scholar Richard Grant White noted the millions of dollars that were being spent on public schools and asked this:

What is the result? According to independent and competent evidence from all quarters, the mass of pupils in these public schools are unable to read intelligently, to spell correctly, to write legibly, to describe understandably the geography of their own country, or to do anything that reasonably well-educated children should do with ease. They cannot write a simple letter; they cannot do readily and with quick comprehension a simple "sum" in practical arithmetic; they cannot tell the meaning of any but the commonest of the words that they read and spell so ill.

Whether or not Mr. White was correct about the extent of incompetency among public school students, he wasn't the only person who thought so. From a Harvard Symposium 2000 report by Martha E. Casazza:

One anecdote which illustrates the confusion and tension of these earlier times comes from Cornell University during the 1830's. Its founder, Ezra Cornell, "approached the professor responsible for admissions decisions and asked why so many applicants were not passing the entrance exam. The professor replied that they didn't know enough. Cornell then asked why the university could not teach the students what they didn't know. The professor replied that the faculty was not prepared to teach the alphabet. 'Can they read?' asked Cornell. The professor's response was that if Cornell wanted the faculty to teach spelling, he should have founded a primary school."

And:

By 1871, Charles Eliot, Harvard's president at that time, lamented that the freshmen entering Harvard had "bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, (and) ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation."

One caveat about the online document that contains these useful reminders: the author seems to think that the difficulties Harvard and Cornell freshmen had with spelling and composition had something to do with the canaille that elite schools were admitting out of charity:

In the 17th century, for example, at Harvard 10% of the student body came from families of artisans, seamen, and servants, and the university reserved places for poorer students whose tuition was paid for either through work or assessments imposed on the wealthier students.

The author seems to think that it was these scholarship students who dragged down the curve; but President Eliot, for example, doesn't seem to be singling them out. Besides, as a result of this concern, "the university developed an exam to include written composition, and by 1879 50% of the applicants were failing this exam and were admitted 'on condition.'" Fifty percent of Harvard freshmen were scholarship boys, and all the poorer students were illiterate? I don't believe it. It's more likely to be the other way around: scholarship boys were "grinds", often mocked and bullied by their more entitled classmates. You only need to think of George W. Bush and the well-known phenomenon of the gentlemen's C to know that Ivy League schools admitted a lot of rich preppies who weren't interested in study and expected to coast through college on their connections. And as the rest of this report shows, preparation for college has always been problematical in the US.

Ms. Brooks doesn't teach at elite schools, though: her CV includes "state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges." But if her students' incapacity is the "shocking deficit" she thinks it is, it's nothing new. This does suggest that the teaching of English should be rethought, but not by a return to the teaching of "basic skills," which never worked very well anyway.

One of my Facebook friends linked to the Salon article, and one person about my age commented,

... I was taught the "traditional way." I spent years in grammar school--yes, it was called that and there was a reason--being taught the mechanics of English from about second to eighth grade. We diagrammed sentences, learning the differences between the parts of speech, and we were marked down for every missing or misplaced comma, every run-on sentence, every wayward quotation mark, and so on. Hey, knowing how to write English is the bedrock of knowing how to communicate with others. I mourn its demise.

First off, of course, knowing how to write English is not "the bedrock of knowing how to communicate with others." Speech is the bedrock of communication with others. Literacy at any level is a relatively recent phenomenon, and widespread literacy is not only more recent, it was resisted by elites. If people couldn't communicate before writing was invented and most people were taught how to do it, what were we doing before then?

It's trivial but maybe not completely irrelevant that "English" isn't the only means of communication, and I suspect that the commenter knows better; but "knowing how to write your own language" isn't that much harder to write, and less ethnocentric. Also, just to nitpick a bit more, spelling and punctuation aren't "grammar." But these are less important than other matters.

Second, the "'traditional' way" endorsed by the commenter doesn't work very well. I went through the trial by ordeal she describes, but it had little effect on me one way or the other because I was already a voracious reader with a good memory, so I absorbed the mechanics of writing standard English before my teachers taught me to diagram sentences. (Which I considered fun, for awhile anyway.)

What was called English grammar then, and still is by "traditionalists," wasn't really English grammar; it was a Frankenstein's monster patched together from Latin grammar and historical and linguistic ignorance. (I remember disagreeing with my fourth-grade teacher, who claimed that some ignorant people said "should of" which was obviously nonsense. This wasn't her eccentricity, of course: I've encountered this construction elsewhere since then. I claimed that what she called "should of" was actually "should've," a contraction that made perfect sense. She refused to consider the point, but at least she didn't punish me. Yes, I was always too damn smart, in various senses of the word, for my own good. But I was right and she was wrong. Fortunately, I was also smart enough to let it go, and it was another lesson that Teacher doesn't always know best.)

Third, "being marked down for missing or misplaced comma, every run-on sentence, every wayward quotation mark, and so on" is a great way not to learn to write, in English or any other language. It is a good way to discourage students from writing, if that's what you want to do. (For more on this general principle, see this.) Traditionally schooling has been used to sort students into various tracks -- "vocational," academic, and others. In Europe and other countries this is often done overtly; in the US we pretend that we don't have a class system, so we sort anyway but pretend we don't. Being taught grammar didn't do me any harm, but I know that traditional modes of teaching did a lot of harm to other kids who couldn't get around them by themselves or with help from their parents, and who ended up thinking of themselves as 'stupid' as a consequence, though they were anything but.

So, what to conclude about Ms. Brooks? She needs to learn something about the history of schooling in America and elsewhere. And then she should look at the work of Alfie Kohn, Harvey A. Daniels, and others who've been rethinking the way we teach English for a long time.

History's A Punk

Something else I wanted to say about the Times article on Susan Jacoby. She told the reporter that she first decided to write The Age of American Unreason on September 11, 2001, in a New York City bar:

As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

If true, this story is depressing, all right; but then I have to balance these men’s historical ignorance with Jacoby’s, since she believes that people are more ignorant now than they were – I don’t know, fifty years ago? a hundred? Even if American schools aren’t teaching World War II in history classes, which is possible for reasons I’ll go into in a moment, that war is ubiquitous in commercial media. The Hollywood blockbuster Pearl Harbor was released with plenty of fanfare in the summer of 2001, and it enraged a number of American critics and audiences who thought it was too historically accurate, that is, not hostile enough to the Japanese. And then we have Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book on the Greatest Generation, the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers about American fighter pilots, Schindler’s List, the History Channel, and much much more. Despite all this, I suppose it’s possible that basic information about World War II has not sunk in to most younger Americans’ psyches, compared to really important knowledge like the records of professional and Division I college athletes.

It’s hard for me to believe that the men Jacoby overheard hadn’t picked up on Pearl Harbor by osmosis, as I did, long before it could have been covered by my American history class; but I’m 57, just five years younger than Jacoby, and I was born ten years after Pearl Harbor. My father and uncles served in the military during the war, though none of them ever talked to me about their experiences, and the war was common coin in all sorts of media, from TV to comic books to the newspapers. On the other hand, though I was born during the Korean War, I never heard anything about it as I was growing up; it wasn’t a Great War, and its American veterans weren’t lionized as a Great Generation.

When I had American history in my junior year of high school (1967-1968), I don’t recall that we got very far into the twentieth century. The history textbooks were massive even then; and they’ve become enormous since. My teacher made a valiant effort, but it was impossible to slog through the entire text in a school year. I know we got as far as Woodrow Wilson’s administration, because I remember the book’s mentioning US warships shelling some Mexican city in 1912 or so, because the local officials had disrespected the American flag. I was appalled, but then I was already coming under the baleful influence of the Dirty Fucking Hippies and the Blame America First Crowd. I don’t remember that anyone else was bothered by the incident, and when I mentioned it to my mother, she also thought it was fair and just.

So I think it’s quite possible that American history classes today don’t get as far as World War II either. If they do, it could only be at a dead run, with facts to be memorized no longer than the weekly quiz and the final exam. That has always been the standard approach to teaching history in American schools, and it has never worked very well. (See the indignant quotation from the New York Times in 1943, in my previous post, for an example of what I mean.) I doubt that high school students in past generations were any better informed or educated about wars that occurred 30 to 40 years before they were born, and that wasn’t because of post-modernist relativism that held all truths are created equal. This is not a new problem, nor can it be simply explained with sloganeering about “junk thought.” Indeed, Jacoby’s book appears to be one more example of junk thought.

Something else occurred to me when I read about Jacoby’s business-suited ignoramuses. Consider the Vietnam War. When I was growing up during that conflict, the standard line all over the media was that the Communists had attacked our ally in South Vietnam, and we were only there because our ally had asked for our help in defending itself against Communist aggression. This account was a complete fiction, as I learned from better sources around the time I graduated from high school. Now that the war is officially history, I wonder how the textbooks explain it. I run into few people of any age, even now, who know anything like the historical truth. That’s a subject for further research, I guess. (I’m thinking of asking students in the dormitory where I work what they know about Pearl Harbor and Vietnam. They’re not a representative sample – it’s an academic dorm – but it will be interesting to ask them anyway. I’ll report back in a week or two.) The origins of the American Civil War (or as I prefer to call it, the Confederate Rebellion) are still controversial, with revisionists trying to whitewash the South to this day; I doubt that the accounts taught to high school students today are any more adequate than the one I was taught.

Imagine, too, how our present adventure in Iraq will be described in the history textbooks thirty or forty years from now. Half-a-dozen different, and often conflicting, justifications for the US/UK invasion of Iraq were floated in the months just before we attacked. Now, even elite media can’t quite make up their minds how we got there, or why we have to stay, and it’s well-established by now that they were eager to be misled by the Bush gang. American history texts prefer to avoid controversy in favor of neat, preferably glorious soundbytes, partly because they must please adopting committees that prefer propaganda to sound history, so I wouldn’t expect much from their coverage of Iraq in years to come. I won’t blame the students if they don’t learn much from it, either.

But again: none of this is in any way new. All the copies of The Age of American Unreason at the local Border’s had been sold today, so I couldn’t browse through it any more. But now I see, from reviews on Amazon.com, that Jacoby was consciously extending Richard Hofstadter’s thesis in Anti-Americanism in American Life, which was originally published in 1963. Why, then, did she tell the Times that she was dealing with a new problem? Because newness is more marketable? If so, she’s lying; if not, she’s ignorant. I agree we have a problem, which has always been with us; I don’t see that dishonesty or sloppiness are going to help any.

P.S. Now there's this review at Salon, which doesn't make Jacoby or her book look any better. But I will read it, when the library gets it. And then there's an interview with this guy, who brings to mind Molly Ivins's remark anent some Texas pol that, if his IQ gets any lower, we'll have to water him. I don't deny that we have a lot of stupid people in this country, but it seems they're all writing books about how dumb everybody else is. But that just reminded me of this exchange from The Importance of Being Earnest:

Jack. I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
Algernon. We have.
Jack. I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
Algernon. The fools? Oh! about the clever people, of course.
Jack. What fools!

A Mad As Hell Tea Party

What, another book on the dumbing down of America? Why does no editor ever seem to dismiss a hopeful author of one of these with “It’s been done”? Because, you know, it has been done, and done, and done to death, in an endless session of “Ain’t It Awful?”

Even more symptomatic, the author of this admits that it’s been done, but that didn’t stop her from doing it again, because things are like really different this time, okay? Susan Jacoby, “one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture”, said:

But now, … something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

One commenter on the Times article wrote:

College professors are routinely confronted with students (not all, thankfully) in need of remedial assistance, let alone individuals possessing critical knowledge of global matters. And yes! College! A college professor (often an overworked adjunct) has all of three months to teach a subject to adults who have spent their formative years learning how to be demanding, adroit pleaders who know the system and their rights and understand that they need a diploma as fast as possible to force a future employer into a slightly higher salary category. Few are interested in learning for themselves, let alone in acquiring the mental self-discipline that analysis and critical thinking foster.

Yes, indeedy, things used to be different. The Greatest Generation, for example.

A large majority of the students showed that they had virtually no knowledge of elementary aspects of American history. They could not identify such names as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, or Theodore Roosevelt. ... Most of our students do not have the faintest notion of what this country looks like. St. Louis was placed on the Pacific Ocean, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, the Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River, St. Lawrence River, and almost every place else.

This, however, was on the front page of the New York Times on April 4, 1943. Gerald Bracey, from whose Setting the Record Straight (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1997, page 68) I swiped this quotation, adds:

What particularly galled the Times was that these ignoramuses were not high school students, they were college freshmen. The Times did not take note of the fact, but we can, that in 1943, the high school graduation rate was about 45 percent. Of these, about 15 percent went on to college. So these ignoramuses were an elite group of ignoramuses - the upper 7 percent of the student body. It is worth noting that the Times did not blame the public schools for the students’ poor performance; such laying of blame would begin shortly after World War II. Rather, the Times seems to have assumed that the students forgot information that they once had known.

And before that? “Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation, and almost entire want of familiarity with English literature, are far from rare among young men of eighteen otherwise well prepared for college.” So said Harvard President Charles William Eliot, complaining in 1871, when elite colleges like Harvard were mainly finishing schools for the sons of the rich. . . just the sons, of course, since conservatives knew that higher education rendered women sterile or insane. Only the occasional very talented and very docile male of African descent attended Harvard or Yale. Jews and the Irish had not yet become Honorary White People. (If I recall correctly, in his Opening of the American Mind Lawrence W. Levine showed that in the Good Old Days, students at the best universities who were actually interested in study and learning were ostracized by the rich men's sons who were there to kill time, drinking and earning their Gentlemen's C's, until they were ready to take over the control levers of the Nation. So no, American apathy -- or antipathy -- to knowledge is not a new development.)

Jacoby’s book just came out in the past week, so it’s not in the local libraries yet, and I’m sure not going to shell out money for it. But I did poke through it standing up in Border’s today, and it surprised me a bit. She spent several pages on Larry Summers, the President of Harvard who took heat for claiming that “innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.” Instead of attacking the PC feminists who want to destroy our great Male Chauvinist traditions, she lit into Summers himself, calling his scientifically-based beliefs “junk thought.” While I agree that Summers’s claims are bogus, they are not evidence of a new ignorance “about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge.” If anything they count against Jacoby’s thesis that people are dumber than they used to be, since even fifty years ago Summers could have said the same things without raising an uproar.

Nor do I agree with the other positions attributed to Jacoby in the Times article. As it happens, I’m now reading the revised edition of James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (Simon & Schuster, 2007), and Loewen reports (page xviii) that the original edition was useful to many students who wanted their history courses to be accurate, as well as to teachers and general readers. Loewen holds that the reason history is such an unpopular school subject is that it’s taught badly and inaccurately, which also is not a new development in American or other cultures. The point is, kids want to learn, even in the face of an educational system that has always been set up to make learning more difficult -- maybe not all kids, but enough to make hash of Jacoby's claims.

Jacoby’s gripe about the academic “decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an ‘academic ghetto’ instead of integrating them into the core curriculum” seems off too. Couldn’t that situation have something to do with the intense and ongoing resistance to such integration by the white males who still mainly run American universities, and the whole society for that matter? As for her claim that “students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests,” that’s simply false. It’s a big topic, but for a start, look here and here and here.

I suppose I’ll have to read her book, or at least skim bigger chunks of it, to see if she can actually back up her bogus claims. But so far it looks like she’s her own best evidence.

Oh, wait, I can’t resist quoting this comment on the article on Jacoby:

Because we have so many foreigners in this country in our Universities, especially from Europe, teaching in our Universities who really have a grudge against America and are finding subtle ways to work their wiles. By being extreme on the “Divirsity” issue, pushing “Gay Rights”, and anything else that causes division, the “extremist” are helping America slide down the same path as Rome did.

And this one:

I share your lament. I sometimes ask people new into the workforce, “When was the Magna Carta signed?” After a blank stare, this will always lead to a conversation about King John, Runnymede, and the march toward democracy. Sometimes combating illiteracy is hand to hand combat.

If I started a new job, and someone asked me out of nowhere when the Magna Carta was signed (1215, for what it’s worth, though it has nothing to do with "illiteracy"), I’d start edging away and looking for a desk to hide behind.

Earlier I mentioned “Ain’t It Awful?”, one of the Games People Play identified by the psychiatrist Eric Berne. In “Ain’t It Awful?” two people complain about the sorry state of the world / humanity; the payoff of the game consists in the shared “good feeling that comes from blaming and finding fault...” as Berne described it. Ain’t it awful that there are all those people playing “Ain’t It Awful?” Seriously, I recognize the pleasure that comes from complaining that the world's going to Hell in a Handbasket, but I'm also well-informed enough to know that our problems are not new and weren't caused by videogames or postmodernism. If Susan Jacoby (and Master of Sockpuppets Lee Siegel, and Eric G. Wilson, along with all the other tillers in this field) want to vent, fine, but why commit their whining to print? Jacoby told the Times, “I expect to get bashed,” as well she should be, for wasting trees on one more useless book.