From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 19:26:08 GMT


                                  Wednesday, the 12th of August, 1992

Michelle Manes chides me I think for not being realistic about
my expectations for high-school lit education.

I figure that I just did a poor job of communicating what I had on
my mind, since I think I'm being very realistic about how bad
this education now is.

When I said ``if I had my druthers, I'd teach Homer and Dante...'',
I meant ``if I were king'' or ``if I were made U.S. educational tsar
with powers to implement a complete overhaul of the U.S. educational
system.'' I didn't mean I'd just start force-feeding high schoolers
stuffy old books that they wouldn't read.

My context was trying to counter the impression I was getting from
Terrance that students now all *are* force-fed stuffy old books
and are never encouraged to read contemporary, politically
relevant works. I think mostly students read next to nothing in high
school, and that indeed a good many teachers give up on classics
entirely and try to teach contemporary stuff in desperation of getting
their students to read anything at all.

Awhile back I had posted that, when I lived in Milwaukee three years
ago, a reporter for the main daily there used to be a high school
teacher and she went back to teach for a couple of weeks and then to report
on her teaching experience for the paper. She taught a high-school
English class that was racially and economically mixed. She would
assign a short story or an essay or a poem for discussion the next day
and was shocked to find that her students ignored every reading assignment
she made. At first she figured she was just not getting any respect
for being a ``sub'', but it turned out that every English teacher in
the school corroborated the observation. All of them were resigned
to the fact that students wouldn't read, they all had taken to showing
a film version in video of any book before they'd try to discuss it, and one
teacher even said that her students rebelled when a particular video she
was going to show them turned out to be in black and white.

So, Michelle, it's sounding to me like maybe we are agreed about the
state of lit education as it now exists in the States.

As to educational reform, perhaps we are not agreed, but I would insist
that what is needed is content-based instruction, starting with first
grade and continuing through high school. No teaching self-esteem, or
considering that the primary purpose of school is day-care or socialization,
but knowledge and skills. I would structure the curriculum over all twelve
grades so that in mathematics, there'd be two years of calculus at
the end, in science, there'd be two years of biology, two years
of chemistry, and two years of learn-calculus-as-you-go physics.
There'd be a broad structure in grades 1-6 of learning skills, in grades
7-12 in introducing the application of these skills. So I'd require
history every year. Lots of dates and timelines and geography and biographical
sketches for grades 1-6, narrative and critical history for 7-12. I'd
have twelve years of a foreign language, probably Spanish in the States,
with students expected to be reading Spanish literature in 7-12. And in
English, grades 1-6 would teach reading and writing and grammar, grades
7-12 would be an introduction to canonical world and American
(and sometimes local) literature and composition. This is where Homer
and Dante and Hardy and Baldwin would come in.

I would try to implement this by setting fixed-knowledge testing
requirements for each grade level, and I would keep people back
who didn't pass these requirements. I would also try to implement
the modes of instruction advocated in the Mortimer Adler-led
reform package of _The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto_.
I would sell the idea that formal education is not so much
a preparation for a job, that a diploma isn't a release from ever
having to read another book, as a preparation for the kind of educational
voyage that lasts a lifetime, a release into self-directed and self-motivated
education. Finally, I would insist strongly on the democratic ideal
Adler insists on: There would be no sheep and goats, no academic
track v. vocational shop courses. Every child is educable. The same
strong program would be for all.

I would also insist that much learning is just plain hard work.
That there's a difference between entertainment and intellectual
joy, and that thinking school should have the entertainment pacing
of television is a mistake. Reading Euclid or Aristotle (at least it
was for me for the first time) may be tedious, but it is, at a deeper level,
thrilling.

I regard this, by the way, as extremely subversive. I don't buy that
you'd end up so much with a bunch of young persons with carbon-copied
minds as individuals who have the real tools necessary to
for creating themselves, for motivating themselves for
their whole adult lifetimes. They'd no longer just grow
up to become marketing statistics for the political or commercial
ad-men. They wouldn't put up with it.

I agree that this is far from present reality, but it's meant to be---
present reality isn't good enough. There are two reasons: First
there's the more theoretical reason that people aren't leading
fulfilling self-directed lives when all they have to entertain
themselves is ad-man directed Pop Culture. Second, there's the practical
reason that education is tied to the Enlightenment notion of
democratically electoral citizenship. Now this electoral citizenship is an
office of high responsibility, and I claim that Americans are mostly not
now responsibly discharging the duties of this office.

                  Mike Morris
          (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)