Hildegarde

Cherly asks why, in America, local community colleges don’t contract with local businesses to teach the skills those businesses need–but, of course, they do.

The problem is that, when it comes to communications skills, to the abilit to read and write coherently, the methods the community colleges, and the high schools, and the four year colleges are using generally don’t work.

An employer seeing a transcript from an unknown college as part of an applicant’s resume will have no way of knowing of that A in  English Composition means the applicant can write well, or can write competently, or can’t write at all.

The first time I ever heard of a composition course was when I was assigned to teach one at Michigan  State in the mid 1970s.  Before then, “freshman composition” had always meant, to me, an introduction to writing about literature course, with assignments in poetry, fiction and drama.  This is the kind of thing Robert is talking about when he complains about being forced to read Silas Marner.

Composition courses, though, often offer no imaginative literature of any kind.   At most, they might offer one short story here and one poem there in a section on how to write about literature.

The bulk of these courses are taken up with attempts to teach students to write coherent standard essays, and they don’t work very well for lots of very good reasons. 

The very first problem, of course, is that it is nearly impossible to teach somebody to write coherently if he can’t read coherently.   And most of the students I teach, even the good ones, cannot be properly said to be able to read.

This is not the result of having been bored by high school force-feeding of the  Canon.  Most high schools these days don’t bother with the Canon, and these kids have grandparents who learned to read very well indeed with that same force feeding.

The reason my kids can’t read is simple: they have no context, and because they have no context they don’t understand what’s going on on the page in front of them.

I’m not talking about some vast, expansive acquaintance with the literary Canon, or with the intellectual history of the West.  I’m talking about the very basic everyday common knowledge without which it is impossible to read  your way through the op ed page of even a mediocre newspaper.

Try this.  Identify the following:  Joseph Stalin.  Pearl Harbor.  1984.  David  Souter.

Most of my students could not identify any of the above.  At all.   The most common response I got to a request to identify Souter was that he must be the Craig’s List Killer.  Stalin is a complete blank to them, and 1984 is just a year in the mists of time before they were born.

Most of my students cannot place the US Civil War in the right century, and an alarmingly large minority of them don’t even know there ever was a US Civil War.   They’re vaguely aware that there was a WWI and a WWII, but they con’t know even approximately when they happened, or why. They’ve heard of Romeo and Juliet but not King Lear, and they’ve read neither of them.

They’re largely unaware that there was ever a time when women in the United States were penalized for getting pregnant out of wedlock, or a time when the law barred children so born from inheriting from their fathers.   They don’t know that the name for what they call “Christian” is, in the rest of the world, “Protestant,” or why anything would be called “Protestant.”  

I could go on like this, but you get the picture.  A student doesn’t have to be dealing with esoteric references to obscure literary works to find herself lost in a text.  These students will be lost in most texts. 

Which means that, if I get them on the college level and I want to teach them to write, I can’t do it by the most effective method, which is by getting them to read lots and lots of really good writing.  They won’t know what it means, and they won’t try to find out.  They’ll just skip over it and declare that it’s incomprehensible.

In case you’re wondering, they do the same with a lot of the popular culture they claim to like.   Green Day videos are as incomprehensible to them as essays by George  Orwell.  Their response is to shrug, decide they don’t care, and only pay attention to the music.

Still, I’ve now got a classroom full of kids who are supposed to be taught how to write in spite of the fact that they don’t really know how to read.  If I’m teaching in a contemporary American high school or community college (or even the bottom end of the four year colleges), I do this by standing in front of a classroom with 25 or so students in it and providing lectures, examples, exercises and finally homework to see if  I can bring them round to doing it.

What reading we do will come out of a textbook written specifically to be used in Composition classes.  These textbooks mean well, but they have one thing in common:  the readings they offer are mindnumbingly, soul crushingly dull.

Composition textbooks do not, in general, push a specifically liberal or conservative line.  They might be better if they did.  Instead, they present essay after essay that is “thoughtful,” “concerned” and “well-reasoned,” meaning that none of the readings ever does the print equivalent of raising its voice.

Almost all the essays are more or less contemporary, and almost all of them are more or less alike.  There are lots of entries from contemporary authors that talk about the problems of growing up Latino/native American/female/gay/Christian/Muslim/with an alcoholic parent.  The idea seems to be that the confessional style and a nearly fanatical concentration on the personal experience will somehow be “relevant” to eighteen year olds.  If the writers of these essays had more interesting lives, maybe they would be.

Other essays in these books present “reasoned arguments,” and the arguments are always studiously reasonable.  And contrary to the mythology, they don’t always present a single point of view.  I got a new textbook in my mailbox yesterday.  It included essays on the issue of divorce from both Barbara  Dafoe Whitehead and Stephanie Coontz, respectively the conservative and liberal voices of that particular public debate.

The best of the composition books out there, that I have seen, is called Current Issues and Enduring  Questions–and it’s actually published by  St.  Martin’s.  Yay!

But it”s the best because it provides some not very well reasoned essays, including one by Rush Limbaugh that absolutely blows the roof off the room.   Most of my students–this is blue state Connecticut we’re talking about here–don’t agree with  single thing he says, but they love the way he writes, because he is not thoughtful, or reasonable, or middle of the road.  He even gives some of them the idea that there might be some point in writing things afterall.

That said, at the end of the day, we’re left with that problem of context.  The reason Mary has so much better luck with the people she hires who have managed to make it through a four year college program is that–depending on the school–they’ve had four more years to build that context, to learn to read, and to therefore be in a position to be better able to communicate on any level.

But lack of context is ont a problem I’m going to be able to solve on my own in one semester when I’m faced with 25 students who are sitting in a room waiting for a “class.”   If you’re really going to teach these students to write, you’d do much better with a focussed tutorial system.

Give these kids one on one time with their teachers.  Have teachers personally explain all the corrections to essays.  Have the teachers monitor each draft.   Have the teachers change the course of the program to fit each individual student’s weaknesses–

Doing this sort of thing in a traditional school is virtually impossible.  And the schools are institutions with entrenched hierarchies and established procedures.   It’s hard to make them move in any direction at all.

The proprietary schools, on the other hand, move as fast as they need to to stay in businesses.  They can provide the kind of tutorial I’m talking about online, because one teacher can deal with forty students individually on line, and pretty much all at once. 

What’s more, they can respond to the kind of complaints that traditional schools cannot.  Got a teacher that’s just blithering on about his personal life instead of teaching?  How about one you gives As to papers he agrees with politically and marks down any he doesn’t?  How about one who doesn’t care what he’s supposed to be doing–teaching a skill–but wants to be doing something else he finds much more important, like making students away of global American hegemony or the need for more stoplights in the central shopping district north of town?

The faculty at proprietary schools do not have tenure.  There are no established “departments” and “divisions” setting policy on how courses are run or what their content should be.   That means the proprietary schools can focus on particular goals without distractions.

And I think that that’s where this system is going.   For students, the proprietary schools make much more sense than the traditional kind in all but a few cases.   They get in, they get their work done, they learn what is relevant to them and then they’re out. 

This sis not, of course, a real education, and it does not address the problem at the root of the confusion in American education. 

But the fact that it’s alread started up on its own means that the irrelevance of the present system and its replacement by something m ore workable, at least in this area, is coming sooner than you think.