perfidy

While all of you are flapping your gums about generational divides, when everybody knows that everything that's really worth learning on that subject comes from TV's "The Wonder Years," I'm going to re-address Brookheiser's remarks on the teaching and learning of history. 

I'm going to start with a discussion that has been ongoing over at Critical Mass. Though the discussion started with a piece on the decline of graduate study in the humanities, reader responses touch on Brookheiser's point. 

Let me excerpt one reader comment here in its entireity:

I have been teaching at [Prominent Private University] for the last two years, and I have been able to see the effects of this relativism on the undergraduates here. They are genuinely bewildered about what, if anything, counts as knowledge. One example that stands out for me: I taught a "Topics in Theory and Criticism" course this last quarter. The usual approach to such a course here is to pick a flavor (Marx/Marxism, Queer/Gender, New Historicism/Foucault, Cultural Studies/Raymond Williams, etc. etc. etc.), read a series of that flavor’s theoretical/critical texts, and then read a more traditionally literary text or two through the lens of the chosen flavor. It seems more than a bit template-driven. 

I tried to do something different—though hardly groundbreaking—with my course: take an historical trip beginning with Plato and working through the various paths that begin there and have ended up here (in the various flavors). I had to adapt the course on the fly, because I was supposed to be teaching a flavors course of my own, so I created a Classical vs. Renaissance theory course into which I snuck all kinds of other stuff "off-syllabus." I thought the class was going miserably—it was sometimes quite difficult to get students to talk about the material we were covering—and I was sure that the approach I was trying was failing. On the last day of class, I got an ovation (there's something that's never happened before). I didn't understand what was going on until a few days later. 

Several students came to see me during office hours to tell me that they had never taken a course quite like this one before. What they had expected was a template-driven, "here's how we apply ****ist theory to texts" approach, because that is how all of their classes are taught in the English department here. I still have a little trouble believing this, but according to my students, this course was the first time they had been asked to analyze the intellectual and/or historical bases of the critics themselves. They had gone into an English major thinking that it was going to be something about literary knowledge, aesthetics perhaps, maybe even history and social context, but none of the ones who spoke with me had been prepared for what you describe as the framework of "deconstructing race and gender, critiquing the concept of subjectivity, and theorizing culture." 

Not a single one of these students had ever read a piece of "theory" or "criticism" earlier than the 1960s (with the exception of one who had been asked to read a short excerpt from Marx). They simply had never been asked to do anything other than "imitate without understanding" (to paraphrase your post). Some of these students will enter PhD programs next year. [PPU] is quite fond, in fact, of taking people straight from a BA into its own PhD program (I was an exception to the general trend). The just barely-post undergraduate students who come here are then immediately put through an Introduction to Graduate Study class that is essentially no different from the template-driven "flavor" courses I describe above (my own here was Marx and Marxism). 

It is painfully obvious to me now that such students are simply not prepared to do much of anything but accept what they are given (or reject it without knowing exactly why or how, or even what the myriad alternatives are). Graduate "education" in a humanities discipline like English seems to be primarily about indoctrination and self-replication. By the time these students are ABD, knowing Foucault backwards and forwards while knowing almost nothing at all about Nietzsche or Plato (not to mention Shakespeare or any number of other "canonical" figures) is not at all uncommon in my experience. Grandiose maneuvers without any background for them - that's the graduate (and undergraduate) "education" I have come to know.

Sound familiar? Sure does to me!! An English student who does not read Shakespeare, or a History student who does not read Gibbon (or, if you like, Foner, Hofstadter, Elkins & McKitrick, Levine...), is like a physics student who can't add two numbers. The humanities in general are suffering terribly from an overuse of postmodernism, and it's turning out a generation of students who are functionally illiterate in their chosen fields. Rather than learn the generalities and overarching themes, students skip straight to what Brookheiser in another context calls "units, floating in ahistorical space." After all, it's much easier to use Foucault to rip an article to shreds than it is to develop a nuanced, deep understanding of the history and traditions you are a student of. We all know what happens when college students get ahold of Big Ideas That Explain Everything. For a padawan learner such weapons are not, only for a Jedi are they. Mmm, yes. If you give a student Foucault, Hamlet is only about sex. If you give a student Marx, King Lear is a parable of Capitalism. These tools are powerful, but they are also crutches, and in the wrong hands lend themselves easily to arrogance, narrowness, and false first principles. 

I must applaud Mike, a real, working teacher of History, for successfully working actual stories into his coursework. That should happen more often. Of course, since I am advocating a "first A, then B/ first walk/then run" approach to education, I suppose I have not sufficiently interrogated the linearity of my pedagogical ideology. Or something. 

All three of us here are former students of Wilson Hoffman. Three cheers for Wil Hoffman! Huzzah!