printReid Buckley on teaching a writing course to the functionally illiterate students in a run-of-the-mill American university:
“…These young people had not been taught to edit. They had not been taught self-criticism. They had been reared in an environment of self-esteem, even when this went unexamined and was unearned. And when they returned a week later with the fruits of their labors, I was appalled. I took the papers home and spent two afternoons and two evenings past midnight editing them.”
“I had to contend with an illiterate heaping of multisyllabic social-studies mush whose meaning was either obscured or contradicted by other heapings of academic mush, as indecipherable as they were ungrammatical. Illicit inferences lurked under false premises like salamanders under rocks. Logical connections did not exist. Non sequiturs were thick as chiggers. Do not mention grace or style. Of the 28 papers I labored through, only in two did I detect talent buried in the rubble. I had never seen anything so hopeless.”
“When I proceeded to go over the essay of another young man, his voice caught in his throat and he broke down. I was taken aback. We hadn’t proceeded beyond the first page. His wasn’t the worst effort, either. But he wasn’t protesting my criticisms. To the contrary. ‘You’re right,’ he kept repeating, tears flowing, ‘It’s awful. I can’t write my thoughts down. They come out a mess, I know!’ And then he related a scandal. Not in four years of high school and three years of college had a single teacher expressed concern about his writing or offered to edit it. When he said this, other students spoke out to confirm cognate experiences. ‘What can I do now?’ this young man asked me despairingly. ‘I graduate in two months!'”
“The dimensions of his doom and that of these other young people hit me with full force. Not once in their educational lives had they been taught to impose order on chaos, that being contrary to the central dogma of liberal-arts education in our country today. There is no such thing as choosing, as distinguishing between the false and the real, discriminating between good and bad. The cost of this heresy to our nation is beyond calculating: for two generations our businesses, professions, universities, and politics have been populated by moral illiterates who reject reason.”
“The art of writing is the soul of reason, from which all civilization has spun. If one cannot give expression to one’s thoughts, one is reduced to grunts. These young men and women were to be graduated in two months’ time. Yet they were functionally illiterate, as the saying goes—a hideous euphemism for being thrust into the adult world intellectually crippled. Several other students who crowded around me now claimed that never had they had their written work reviewed. I was incredulous. “Never?” “Not once!” came their reply…”
[SNIP]
Do read “The Write Stuff.” It’s a tad overwritten, in my opinion. Reid, moreover, fails to distinguish between the problem of functional illiteracy and the blight of postmodern writing. The two are distinct, with some overlap. In all, the extent of the horror of the betrayal of generations of students by pedagogues cannot be repeated often enough. Kids don’t deserve this.
Update (August 26): Edmund Burke: “Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” (From “Reflections on the Revolution in France.”Vol. iii. p. 335.)
Indeed–so true. Why I left University teaching–tenured at that….
Given what was posted, imagine what it’s like for math and science. Try and concieve what mathematics “instruction” consists of in most high schools and colleges! Language instruction? Oh what–all of this is the product of dead white males so lets reject it all! Its impure and incorrect, we will wait for Inca math, African engineering and post modern chemistry….The end times are nigh.
People are illiterate because the government is running and/or funding our educational system. Everything the state touches turns to crap. Why would schools be any different?
Next up: what’s left of our health care system. It’s bad enough that the government schools churn out idiots. With government run health care, people will literally be dying. A word to the wise: Don’t get sick. And homeschool your kids while you’re at it.
After obtaining a master’s degree in literature, I taught for a number of years at the community college level. I was roped into teaching what the institution called “developmental writing.” The DW courses were instituted to prepare students who were not ready for English Composition for college credit. There were 3 levels of DW. Students were assessed and placed at a level and had to pass through 1 to 3 levels before enrolling in college-level composition. While teaching level 3 one semester, the lowest DW level, I found myself pounding my head against the wall to help students understand the concept of a thesis sentence and supporting material. At level 3, the goal for these students was merely to write an intelligible paragraph, not a lengthy paper. So one day I decided to have them read aloud the short paragraphs we were using as examples from a text, so that they could get the gist of a thesis sentence. They could not read through the short paragraphs, written most likely at a 5th or 6th grade reading level, in a coherent way. It hit me then. They can’t write because they can’t read. Who sold these students down the pipe when they all had 12 years in public schools to learn to read and write? I told my supervisor I would never teach DW again.
I was fortunate to be required to waste only one semester of my life on an “English Composition” college requirement which had NOTHING to do with composition since (like most “English” teachers) the teachers only wanted to talk about their favorite books. Grammar – fuggedaboutit!
The real bad stuff is what goes into technical journals – where difficult science and engineering combines with domestic illiteracy and foreign language ignorance. Add a healthy DOSE of “Power Point” to complete the technical/literary lobotomization process!
Dose – not does. Dats watt happins wen I tipe qwickly n don’ use spel-Czech!
My awakening to how awful government schooling is came around 1995 when I read an essay by my boss’s 8 year old son. Both parents were highly educated, intelligent and affluent. Literally every word in the essay was misspelled. I was very embarrassed and did not know what to say.
Well, “literally” may be too strong. I suppose he spelled single letter words correctly. I was in shock so I can’t be sure.
When I entered college, I had to take a “Dumbbell Math” class. The first thing our instructor taught was- “A proper math question will read and answer as if it were a proper sentence.” He taught math by that method and within a week, students could solve “pop math questions,even algebra level questions” verbally, while standing at their desks without needing a pen and paper. Learning to write is essential to all disciplines.
I doubt this comes as a surprise but middle and high school curriculum have dropped grammar as a requirement. I took an “advanced writing” course my senior year in high school as an elective where I learned what used to be called basic grammar. This was in 2002.
Ilana has written about “the adulation of the child” before. Is that ideology responsible for our education system? Do we simply believe that teenagers are already endowed with “uncorrupted wisdom” and are loathe to “corrupt” them with rigidity?
Bob, aren’t the teenage years hailed as the crescendo of one’s existence by Hollywood et al?
I am very glad and very fortunate that I finished high school in 2000. I was fortunate to be instructed in Afrikaans, which was largely unaffected by the global “dumbing down” that the Romantic languages are going through. According to the then functioning SA education ministry, First language Afrikaans is a harder subject than Physics, Chemistry and Math, while English was given a lower rating. It’s also telling that the subject I scored the highest marks in was in fact English First Language. But I don’t have any major qualms about how things were done back then, but now we are also being swept away by the current of institutionalized stupidity.
It’s horrendously ridiculous that a University would even OFFER a course in grammar or reading skills that I was taught in grade 7. As far as I can tell, University is where you learn to apply your skills, not where you get audited.
Paul Gottfried and I, recently, were commiserating with one another about the sort of review which is all too frequent on the Amazon.com site. Some of the Amazon reviews of my little Student’s Guide to Music History are priceless. The following extracts are quotes:
“The term ‘student’s’ is used too broadly in the title. For high schoolers and even college students it proves to be a difficult read.”
“The way it is written, though, makes me feel like I’m being bludgeoned by big words. I’ll open to a random page and pick a random excerpt to show you what I mean – p. 44 ‘Suspected of revolutionary and freethinking sentiments, Schubert nevertheless stayed, at least formally, within the Catholic Church in which he had been nurtured.’ The author could have easily reduced his writing style to more simple terms, making them easier to understand and available to a wider audience. He chose to make this text extremely wordy and that just bothers me enough to give it a poor review.”
My 12-year-old nephew has no perceptible difficulty in understanding my printed prose, which has given trouble to these (presumably college-educated) Amazon geniuses. This nephew would also, I imagine, avoid such grammatical solecisms as “makes me feel like [sic]I’ve been …”