Hildegarde

I  want–I really  want–to get to Rick Shenkman’s comments about how to get my students interested in history, but before that I want to answer what I think has become confusion enough in this discussion:  knowledge for its own sake and utility.

Robert complains that I can’t have it both ways–either the liberal arts comprise those things we study for their own sake, with no reference to what we might use them for, or they’re useful somehow and can be defended that way.

But the fact is that I can have it both ways, because there’s no contradiction here.   Einstein didn’t study physics becaus he thought he could “do” something with it–hell, it didn’t even help him get a job.  He was interested in the nature of the universe, and he was compelled to explore it, even if it had no use he could see. 

But it’s neither surprising nor unusual that someone came along later and found a use for it, or even that Einstein himself did.  I have found my own education almost infinitely useful in my life, and I think the fact of it has profoundly changed me as a human being, but that’s not why  I wanted to study literature.  I wanted to know because I wanted to know.

My objection is to the habit we’ve gotten into of saying things like, “You’re majoring in philosophy?  What kind of job can you get with that?”  It’s a habit in which we place no value on the knowing itself, only on what it can do for us, preferably something down to earth and everyday, like getting a job.  And getting a job is important, but it has nothing to do with education.

But, back to Rick Shenkman, and his contention that my students only find history boring because they’ve been taught history badly.

First let me stipulate:  my students have been taught almost everything badly, assuming that they’ve been taught it at all.   The solid core of them  have attended the worst sort of inner city high schools.  I don’t know what goes on in them, but it can’t be much, because these kids arrive in my classroom knowing virtually nothing about anything.   A couple of years ago,  I gave a class a freewriting assignment.  Answer the question:   Your town has decided to erect a monument to you.  Why?

About ten minutes into the exercise I walked around the room and found one kid with absolutely nothing written on his paper.  I leaned over to give him a little encouragement, only to figure out, after some difficulty, that his problem was really simple–he had no idea what the word “erect” meant.  Well, okay, he knew what it meant in the sexual sense, but he had never heard it used otherwise.  

This is not just bad teaching, it’s wholesale educational neglect, and when  I get angry these are the kids I get angry about.   They are the ones with the most to gain, or lose, by the educational system.   If they don’t “make it”–and most of them don’t come close–they go back to the kind of neighborhoods most of us associate with Beirut.

But these are also not the kids expressing the kind of attitudes about history, and knowledge,  I was talking about in the last post.   I have a word of advice for anyone thinking of teaching in a remedial program:  the students you have to be most afraid of are the ones who are upper middle class and white.  

The minority kids might not understand the rationale, but they do know that negotiating the system is crucially important.  They fail not because they don’t care, or because they resent the work, but because they’ve been so badly prepared that they need something more than a remedial program could give them.

The middle and upper middle class white kids in these programs are something else again.  Some of them come from very good high schools indeed, but over the last few years I’ve decided that a big bait and switch is going on in those with the least able and motivated students.

By that I mean that the best suburban high schools do an excellent job of teaching things–to the top ten percent of their students.  Those are the kids in AP courses and honors courses, the ones with ambitions to go to the Ivies or the Seven Sisters or the service academies, and the schools take them very seriously. 

With the rest of their population, though, the goal is to get them through and out without too much hassle from their parents, who simply will not accept that Sweetheart could get a D in anything, never mind fail it.  So these students are given classes where the standards are undemanding and nobody really cares if they learn anything or not. 

Then, when their SATs look like golf scores, they get sent to me.

Rick Shenkman says he doesn’t believe that a student, presented with the opportunity to discover why he thinks the way he does, could possibly be bored by a pursuit of the answer.

I think that Rick Shenkman is what I was before I started teaching in these programs:  a smart kid who went to college with a lot of other smart kids and then went to work in a profession only smart kids have a chance to enter.  I am, after all, a Vassar girl with twenty-two published mystery novels to my credit.  For years before I married–another mystery novelist, who graduated from Syracuse–I worked on women’s magazines and at publishers. 

In other words, I had never in my life met people like my students on any scale.   Oh, sure, one or two, you can’t avoid them–but when it’s only one or two (or my cousins), it’s easy to dismiss them as anomalies.   If somebody had told me–okay, my father did try to tell me–that there’s an entire population out there, and a big one, with these kinds of attitudes to knowledge and understanding, I would have dismissed him as just plain wrong.

Consider a student I had last year.  I’d assigned an essay for analysis, and understanding it required knowing that Robert  E. Lee was at the head of the Confederate forces in the American  Civil War.  It was one of those things, a throwaway reference, that expected the reader to “just know” and in just knowing to make connections that framed a more current event.  So  I pointed to this young woman and asked her if she knew who Robert E. Lee was.

No, she didn’t know.

I asked the class generally, and got no volunteers.  So I explained the reference myself.

The young woman put up her hand and demanded, “How was I supposed to know that?  It happened before I was born!  How’s that supposed to make me a better nurse right now?”

I’m going to try an experiment–I’m going to print out Rick Shenkman’s comments on the last post and hand them out to my class, to see what they say.  I could be surprised, but I don’t think I will be.   The general response to demands that they know anything they don’t feel like knowing–which takes in the majority of what is available to know in the world–is anger and resentment, often followed by heroic efforts not to learn it.  

What’s more, they won’t even approach reading with anything like an active engagement–they won’t, for intsance, ask questions about vocabulary they don’t know or references they don’t get.   With my inner city students,  I can blame bad schools and bad teachers who didn’t like questions and didn’t respond to them in any useful way.  With my upper middle class students, who went to high schools I know and which work overtime to make learning “active,” I can find no exuse. 

One of the other things I assigned for reading on that same class day as I assigned the Shenkman piece was a book review of Susan Jacoby’s Age of  American Unreason. I’ve read that book and I don’t actually think it’s very good, but the essay was short and funny. 

Or, I thought it was funny.

Unfortunately for what followed, including the discussion of  Shenkman’s piece, the book review was funny because it made fun of two specific incidents of ignorance:  somebody who thought  Europe was a country; and two guys who thought Pearl Harbor had something to do with the Vietnam War.

I could see the storm clouds gathering in the face of the young woman in the front row, the same one who would later demand to know why Mr. Shenkman thought anybody should bother to know all that stuff about politics and history.

“I don’t see why it’s all right to laugh at these people,” she said. “i’m one of these people and I’ve got every right to be.:

As it turned out, she had, before reading the article, thought Europe was a country, and she had thought Pearl Harbor had something to do with the Vietnam War.

And she mightily resented the suggestion that this somehow made her stupid, or ignorant, or required to go look into a bunch of stuff she couldn’t see any reason to bother with.  

It’s possible that all of this comes from bad teaching.  It’s possible that better middle school and high school teachers could have fixed this, could have inspired even in my kids–and in the half of the population that doesn’t go on to college after high school–a respect for and interest in learning.

But I think something bigger is going on here.  This attitude is not restricted to my students.  On the few occasions when I have a chance to meet their parents, their parents usually exhibit it as well.   And then there is, as I started out saying, the Sarah Palin phenomenon, the presentation of a political candidate whose “ordinariness” and ignorance were displayed as a positive virtue–under the impression that there are people in the  United  States today who would vote for such a person not in spite of that ignorance, but because of it.

My students read almost nothing.  They don’t understand what they do read.   In fact, if you give them something to read and ask them what it means, they tend to make a guess vaguely in the direction of the subject matter, with the emphasis on some platitude they’ve heard somewhere that they expect to be hearing again.   When they run into things they don’t know, they don’t look them up.  They don’t even ask me.  They just glide right by them and then complain they can’t understand anything.

But they did understand Mr. Shenkman’s piece, so I’m going to take his comments in next week and see what they make of them.

In the meantime, I will point out again that it’s not just my students.  Some of the posters here will remember the discussion on RAM about The  Da Vinci Code, and the person who declared that it didn’t matter if the book was historically inaccurate to the point of ludicrousness, he didn’t  know any of that anyway and it was a good story.

This was the same person who, in another thread, declared that he read for entertainment, and if he came across a book that made him work in any way, he just got rid of it.

But let me bring those comments in to class, and see what happens.