To be culturally illiterate is to be less than fully human
That's my elitist line in the sand, elicited by a polemical editorial in - of all places - USA Today about how textbooks are making our children stupider. Readers of Diane Ravitch's The Language Police will be familiar with the contours of the argument, and I think everybody out there who reads weblogs at all has lamented at some point the sorry state of our public schooling. It's as easy as poisoning pigeons in the park. But, MAN.
From the piece:
Take the McDougal Littell text that we finally adopted for 9th- and 10th-graders. It starts off with a unit titled "Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew Literature," followed by sections on the literature of Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China and Japan. Then comes "Persian and Arabic Literature" and "West African Oral Literature" — and that's only the first third of the book. There are still more than 800 pages to plough through, but it's the same drill — short excerpts from long works — a little Dante here, a little Goethe there and two whole pages dedicated to Shakespeare's plays. One even has a picture of a poster from the film Shakespeare in Love with Joseph Fiennes kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. The other includes the following (which is sure to turn teens on to the Bard):
"Notice the insight about human life that the following lines from The Tempest convey:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare's plays are treasures of the English language."
They are? Well goody! And Leo DiCaprio stars!
Allow me to preen for a moment, because I got lucky in high school. Well not lucky in the usual sense; I was a Quiz Team geek and our type didn't have willing groupies, but lucky in a larger sense. You see, my poor backward rural cow-town in the rust flats of Ohio was blessed with one Mr. Speece, an elderly English teacher who presided over Intensive English I-IV. Over four years, the curriculum went as follows:
Freshman year - American writers: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Ann Porter, etc.
Sophomore year - British writers: Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Maugham, Chaucer (unexpurgated), Beowulf
Junior Year - Continental and Russian writers: Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Turgenev
Senior Year - More of the same, but Frencher, plus drama: Balzac, Proust, Ibsen, Checkov.
Every finished book required a five-page expository essay explicating some aspect of the work. We were graded on spelling, grammar, clarity, cogency, and concision of argument. Our sophomore-year midterm consisted of memorizing and writing out in class 500 lines of poetry of our choice. The final: 1000 lines.
Thanks to Daniel Speece, I learned what Spanish Fly is, what "do a Cattleya" means in A Recherce du Temps Perdu, and how to fold and tear a calling card to convey to a lady I call upon that I'd like to have sex with her at some future date. Yes, I hated Hemingway and thought Anna Karenina was turgid and dense, but having read and though about those texts prepared me for college and in some very important ways for life. And without getting too snooty-snooty elitist about it, I'm very happy to have had the chance to read all these books and carry away from them a rich sense of the breadth of human experience. Revenge takes so many forms: Othello's betrayal, Eustacia Vye accidental vengeance, Mrs. Treadwell watching herself dispassionately as she beats a pattern of crimson half moons in Danny's unconscious face with her high heel. Ditto love; whether Anna K's final solution, Hamlet's roiling mix of love and hatred or poor Philip Carey's pathetic mooning after his dull and worthless Mildred. None of these things would make it anywhere near most high school English curricula today, and I think we are poorer for it.
Reason mag has a good discussion of this editorial with some great comments including this priceless illustration of what I like to call "the problem:"
When I taught Shakespeare, I was saddened that the kids would laugh at "What ho!" but completely miss the sexual innuendo in something like Mercutio saying, "the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon."
Part of what separates us from dogs and robots is our shared heritage, and without that we become something less than complete. This goes double if you can't even recognize a simple dick-joke. It's why I became a (failed, apostate) historian and it's why I get so exercised about junk like this. I'd rather not homeschool my children; my wife and I both like to work. But it looks like I'm going to have to.
[wik] One of the problems with blogging is that it's so off-the-cuff. Some writers seem to thrive in that format; I don't know if I do. My pieces come out better and more fully formed if I give them time to marinate.
My biggest problem, out of many, with the textbook example excerpted above is that the sentence "Shakespeare's plays are treasures of the English language" is in itself an empty assertion. A person cannot simply read that statement along with two pages of disembodied quotations from larger works and understand in any way why people think Shakespeare is so great, much less how they might think it is so.
I can tell a child that "fire is hot; it burns," or "someday a woman will break your heart; you will want to die" but one of the tragedies of life is that we all have to live it for ourselves. If I could endure every burn and heartbreak for my (future; as yet theoretical) child, I would in a second. If I could open their eyes to the boundless invention and sheer joy of Shakespeare's prose, I would in a second.
But for one thing. To know something, really know it, you have to go through it ready or not. That's what life is all about. And for every burn, for every heartbreak, for every petty cruelty heaped upon an already straining back by the business of daily living, there is a Shakespeare, a Heinlein, a Chandler, a Bible, shit, even a Nightmare on Elm Street to show you there are greater and more wondrous things in the realm of human experience than you ever knew.
A teacher's job, ideally, is to lead students to the point where they can realize this for themselves. For a teacher cannot instill; they can only create the opportunity for learning. But if we don't give teachers even the chance to do that, if we deaden the pleasures and pains in the lessons in the name of 'diversity' or 'moral hygiene,' than we make it a teacher's job to raise intellectual veals.
Shakespeare isn't great until you've picked your wordy way through Othello or Macbeth, gotten inside the language, been smacked in the face with a wet woolen glop of alien-yet-familar genius and come away a little changed. Before that it's just "fain prithee jakes petard; forsooth! bawdy bedpresser, for lo thine shivers I see!"
"Shakespeare's plays are treasures of the English language" in the same way that "it really hurts to break your leg."
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To be fair, I don't believe
To be fair, I don't believe you are a failed historian. You've not really tried to be one, in a professional, paying way. Can't fail if you didn't try.
Alot depends on the district in question, and of course the individual teacher. If you have a teacher who's in essence a municipal employee and is marking off how long he has left til retirement, I don't think you ought to expect alot from him. Or her. Him or her.
I doubt I'll be homeschooling, at least in terms of 7 hours a day, all subjects. But my prime focus will be literacy for the coming young 'un. If I can encourage that as much as possible, hopefully anything else he wants to know or do will be accessible.
Cain't hargue, Johno.
Cain't hargue, Johno. Unfortunately, cain't homeschool neither, but I do see a fair bit of supplemental and/or corrective instruction in the future.
On the plus side, I was talking Harry Potter (we started Half-Blood Prince last week) with my six-year-old, and I was thrilled when he said, "I think it's time for less TV and more books."
Ken, that's got to be a good
Ken, that's got to be a good feeling. I struggle with my own desire to watch lots of tv (mostly news, documentaries (war channel!) and movies) and to not watch tv and set a good example for my spawn.
Mrs. Buckethead and I have already decided to go the homeschooling route. Modern public education is “Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language” multiplied and ramified across all disciplines. With a healthy dollop of PC ridiculousness and earth is our mother sanctimoniousness for icing on the cake. My wife was a public school teacher, and knows in depth the level of mediocrity that is enshrined therein. Also, I've talked to my nephew, now about to enter high school, and the things that he thinks he knows are frightening. His dad tries to disabuse him of the worst boners, but what preteen boy wants to listen to dad?
Homeschooling or hideously expensive private education are the only two ways out of a borken system.
A "borken" system? Are you
A "borken" system? Are you sure this is the right thread? Bork bashing is over [url=http://old.perfidy.org/index.php/weblog/comments/president_christ_can_s…].
And that's the other thing. I'm not sure I want to raise a kid who "thinks he knows" a zillion wrong things. We all go through the phase where we're the expert on everything "duh, dad!" and so forth, but I'd rather my kid come by that honestly, rather than have a cadre of ill-paid public servants foist that on him. The worst lies are half-truths you learn from people with authority. Or something epigrammtic like that, but zippier.
If I had been home schooled,
If I had been home schooled, I would have typed "broken." I gots to make do with what public education learned me.
Or maybe I am one of the
Or maybe I am one of the CHIKDREN OF DEVIL.
On a related note, I had one
On a related note, I had one of my students--a graduate student, mind you--ask me if I actually graded spelling and grammar in my (all essay) exams. I don't take off a ton for it--anyone can slip up once and I have a few international students in every class--but yes, I do. I told the class, "I don't go overboard grading for grammar and spelling, but it's the language of Shakespeare and Milton. Show some respect."
Given a "good enough" public
Given a "good enough" public school system and active parenting, I delude myself that the cruft that's jammed into kids' heads over time by those municipal employees can be neutralized.
My daughter was in a private school for four years, until the end of first grade, at which point she reached the end of that particular school's service offering.
Alternate private schools for grades 2-12 are all too far away to be reasonable alternatives, and home-schooling is likewise not feasible. So off to the local school district she went. We pay taxes out the wazoo for some of the best schools in south Texas, which isn't necessarily saying all that much.
But, having only one kidlet, it's easier to ensure that we keep her engaged and questioning, and I, like Ken, have had the pleasure of hearing her say "more books, less TV". Now, that could be because she's already memorized the words to all the episodes of SpongeBob, Jimmy Neutron, and The Fairly Odd Parents, but I hope it's because she enjoys a bit more mental exercise. As in most things, time will tell.
Ken and Patton, you are both
Ken and Patton, you are both lucky, lucky men to have bright kids who can find enjoyment in books. This is a little more personal than I probably need to get, but I live in fear, actual fear, that one of my kids will come out an oaf. A genetic, dyed-in-the-wool oaf. I don't give a good rat's ass whether the kid turns out a garbage collector, a ticket taker, or a professor of astrophysics; it's just important to me that they like to learn.
And I will be god damned for a fool if any public school system will ever suck that out of them.
Everyone has that fear, Johno
Everyone has that fear, Johno. It's unlikely. It's been my experience and observation that even people we'd consider "not too bright" are actually plenty bright enough, given clear information free of jargon, sufficient time, and higher expectations than those to which they might be accustomed. Helps if they're not stoners.
Young kids hew to the example their parents set. Yours will be fine, I'm sure.
Uh, ditto what Ken said.
Uh, ditto what Ken said.
The school my daughter attends has little to do with her curiosity. Her mother and, embarrassingly, to a (slightly) smaller extent, I have plenty of control over the matter, enhancing, debunking, or attenuating what she picks up elsewhere.
Just as did my parents, and, from what I can tell, my wife's parents.
I come from a very large family with varied levels of education, experience, and "material success". However, I'd be hard-pressed to choose the oaf in this group of 8 siblings. The oaf doesn't exist, though simple statistics would tell you he or she should. Why not? Good parents, I tells ya. And because the outcome isn't random at all.
Fear not, as you've nothing to fear.
Interrestingly enough, the
Interrestingly enough, the homeschool curriculum that Stephen and I have chosen is the "Great Books Curriculum" based, as you can infer, on the great literary works of the Western world (for starters). It begins at age 3. Not only am I excited for my kids, I am excited for myself. I was always a bookworm and read a lot, but there is also a lot I missed out on that I will finally get to read. It's also self-guided past a point, which frees me to do other things besides teach (like work at home) and instills the whole "your education is your responsibility" thing in the kid. There will be Mark Twain in our children's futures. Oh, and LOTS of Shakespeare. Past a certain age (12?), the child is included in online Socratic discussion groups led by their staff--something I didn't see until college. Honestly, I can't wait to see my children grow up and experience this.
That being said, I do agree with Patton. I'm sure you and Jean would have no problem guiding your theoretical children through the theoretical public school system while making sure they still love learning and reading. It just depends on where you want to focus your energies in relation to schooling. Steve and I, being the lazy types, are simply aiming for the front end.