A lot of Americans don’t seem to like highly educated people, and they don’t want them running the country. They prefer people with poor academic backgrounds, like John McCain, whose class rank in college was 894 out of 899, and like Sarah Palin, who got a degree in communications at the University of Idaho, a Tier 3 school in the US News and World Report rankings. Mike Huckabee, who had a very parochial college education, did extremely well in the primaries. If John McCain drops Palin from his ticket, he might well pick up Huckabee, who seems to share her genial indifference to large parts of the world outside of the United States.I'm not sure another "Democrats=smart, Republicans=dumb" squabble is the best counter-argument. I recently reacted to the column, and subsequently finished Real Education, the basis for the column. With the hurricane moving in, I will have time to post a proper review. (I'm embellishing. The rainy low-pressure system moving in came ashore as Gustav. Kerry is dealing with Hanna. Anybody remember the Walt Disney documentary in which a previous Hannah had its name retired for five years?) Mr Murray's thesis relies on faulty statistical inference, in ways that go beyond technical quibbles at the third decimal place. That calls for a proper review. My focus tonight is on Professor Soltan's summation.
Given this preference for intellectually average and below-average folk in positions of power, I think we need — with Country First the watchword — to take a position as far away as possible from Charles Murray’s. We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents’ religion. If they don’t get this in college, they’re not going to get it anywhere else.That's part of Mr Murray's larger complaint, actually: the common schools have failed to do that work, which leaves it to the colleges. High schools that do a better job could mean less access-assessment-remediation-retention for college faculty (and many of us who work at the mid-majors, or "fourth-tier" institutions in Professor Soltan's ordering, would like to do less of that work and do more for our eager students who might be optimizing under constraints that place George Washington University outside their feasible sets).
There are several posts that suggest the failure of the common schools is actually a failure of trying too hard. Via Newmark's Door, I found this gripe by a teacher of literature in a private school.
Great. More future rivet-counters on faculty committees and alienated savants in culture-studies workshops. The teacher confesses it's from trying too hard.If ever there were a teaching conundrum, today's high-school English teachers are smack in the middle of it. It's our job to take digital natives -- teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube -- and get them to strike up a relationship with pictureless chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature. More and more, this mission feels like blind idealism.
But as school starts up again, it's time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn't the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We've shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit in the saga of diminishing teen reading: the high-school English classroom. As much as I hate to admit it, all too often it's English teachers like me -- as able and well-intentioned as we may be -- who close down teen interest in reading.
"Butchering." That's what one of my former students, a young man who loves creative writing but rarely gets to do any at school, called English class. He was referring to the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes. The thesis-driven essay assignments that require students to write about a novel they can't muster any passion for ("The Scarlet Letter" is high on teens' list of most dreaded). I'll never forget what one parent, bemoaning his daughter's aversion to great books after she took AP English Literature, wrote to me: "What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."
Somehow, I've avoided Catcher and Puritan roots notwithstanding find Scarlet Letter soporific even when it's not required. The columnist's examples might not work for me, but the principle is correct.How do I know? Because kids tell me. Every June, when I asked my students at a previous school to write about a favorite book of the year, they mostly gushed over two: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." For years, "Catcher" served as a successful icebreaker for my juniors, exciting debate while eliding the gender divide. Whether they admired Holden Caulfield's quirkiness or disparaged him as a jerk, both my male and female students were eager to argue about him.
So imagine my dismay when "Catcher" was demoted to the eighth or ninth grade. Apparently it wasn't sophisticated enough for 11th-graders, its language too facile, the plot insufficiently complex. That many 17-year-olds identify powerfully with Salinger's 17-year-old protagonist was a fact cast by the wayside.
But here's what a former student wrote in an essay about this book that knocked her socks off: "To my twelve-year-old self, the book didn't seem to move anywhere. I didn't understand why Holden couldn't just try a little harder at school. By tenth grade, I had been drunk for the first time. I knew rebellion against my parents, the difficulties of teenage romance, the fakeness of social interaction. As a reader in the eleventh grade, I grew close to Holden; he was a friend who understood me." In adults' determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soulmates.
Far too often, teachers' canonical choices split from teenagers' tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels. "Why do we assume that every 15-year-old who passes through sophomore English is an English major in the making?" asks a teacher friend. "It's simply not the case. And the kids go elsewhere, just as fast as they can -- anywhere but another book."Perhaps the approach fosters anti-intellectualism.
I watched this play out last year when the junior reading list at my school, consisting mainly of major American authors, was fortified with readings in Shakespeare, Ibsen and the British Romantic poets. When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a month-long study of American transcendentalists, it became clear that they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. "When will we read something with a plot?" asked one agitated boy, obviously yearning for afternoon lacrosse to begin.I like "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" but "The World Is Too Much With Us" is phony nostalgia for thirty year life expectancies and infectious diseases.
On the other hand, the approach neglects other dimensions of intellectual curiosity.
There are additional reactions by Joanne Jacobs and Erin O'Connor, who notes,One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."
Okay, you may think, this is a kid geared to excel in history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."
The literature class is not the only generator of student disengagement. A retired Los Angeles schoolteacher and professor of education offers an elaboration on Mr Murray's ideas, in a way that echoes the literature teacher's complaint.A recurring teacherly misstep is assigning books to which only girls are likely to be able to relate: How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, The Awakening, that sort of thing.
I was a very easy to please student myself. I just got so excited about reading actual, complete literary works--as opposed to selections from the textbook--that I was an easy sell. But I do recall that I had smart, thoughtful teachers who made sure that they assigned books and plays that contained something for everyone.
The columnist complains that algebra is a manifestation of the college-for-everyone mindset. I fear there's something more. Algebra is logic, and the habits of algorithmic thinking are useful for philosophers and for pipefitters. I fear the literature teacher's gripe generalizes. Although I am not aware of a column complaining that the math curriculum treats all middle-schoolers as future math majors, there are components of the so-called "new math" that qualify. Take set theory. Please. My sixth-grade class included some concepts whose usefulness in algebra, or later high school classes was never apparent, although I had some familiarity with them when I started doctoral work in economics. There might have been some building blocks of real analysis in that curriculum as well. I can't be sure -- one of the humbling comparisons of economics with math is that most of the theorems economists rely on are in the first chapter of a real analysis text.At present, just more than half of the state's eighth-graders are taking Algebra 1 as part of the new policy mandating the course for all within three years. Yet already, the requirement has singularly resulted in an increase in the dropout rate beyond the 24.2 percent in the 2006-07 school year. Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell has warned that the requirement sets every school in the state up for failure.
For schools serving large numbers of poor and minority students, the results are expected to be disproportionately felt. That's because career and technical education, which has proved instrumental in the past in boosting graduation rates for these students, will lose more funding to accommodate the Algebra 1 mandate.
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