When I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in English at the end of the 2011 academic year, I panicked. If you’ve seen John Mulaney’s new Netflix special, “Kid Gorgeous,” you’ll know why it wasn’t just the springtime sun on my black robe that was making me sweat that afternoon. About 20 minutes into his routine, Mulaney admonishes his audience after they applaud how he spent $120,000 on an English degree, calling it “the worst financial decision” he ever made. What’s worse is that, at the end of it all, he walked across the graduation stage “hung over, in a gown, to accept a certificate for reading books [he] didn’t read.”
Now, without getting into too much detail, I’ll simply say that I can, at least in part, relate to Mulaney’s experience. You certainly don’t have to read every book you’re assigned to pass your classes. In actuality, the successful English major (and any other student in the humanities) needs three things to graduate: marginally competent writing skills, an ability to skim canonical works, and a willingness to speak during group discussions. That’s it. And there are some who probably get by with less.
Fortunately, Mulaney finds the humor in all this so that English and other liberal arts majors across the country don’t have to dwell on a more depressing idea expressed in the classic film, “Good Will Hunting.” If you’re one of the few people who hasn’t seen that movie, I’ll briefly summarize the scene: Matt Damon’s savant character mocks higher education during a confrontation at a bar, claiming that a few bucks in library late fees is equivalent to the learning amassed over four years spent as a Harvard history major.
So whether you’re laughing, crying, or doing a bit of both, we’re left with an ugly fact: American liberal arts education is broken, and no one seems to be in a rush to fix it. You might wonder how or why this topic and other important questions aren’t getting much face time in arenas of educational discourse.
How can English majors graduate without reading their material thoroughly? Why, according to extensive research done by professors like Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, are students not improving their critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing abilities after four years in school? It seems like a rehashing of the educational tale as old as time: an older generation grows frustrated with its younger students whose behavior and learning styles they don’t understand. And while that might be a tempting train of thought, glancing inside the cover of Arum and Roksa’s 2011 book, Academically Adrift, stops that superficial argument in its tracks. The two sociology professors dedicated their research to their students. Clearly, the intention is not to deride or lament, but to help.
To address any possibility for a solution, however, we must locate the roots of the problem. Unfortunately, I have particularly keen insight here, because I actually managed to outdo John Mullaney’s financial boondoggle by pursuing a degree even more hilarious: a master’s in Education. In the courses required for such a degree, professors with little to no teaching experience outside the university offer their passionate thoughts on how to fix our nation’s educational woes. This is not to say there aren’t hard working, well-meaning, intelligent men and women in this discipline. There are, and I loved their classes.
But where schools of education lead us astray is in their tendency to adopt glitzy buzzwords under the guise of improving student learning. Take grit, for example, Angela Duckworth’s lucrative reissue of what is actually conscientiousness, one of the “big five” personality traits. Or take “challenge-based learning” as another fad that’s made millions for companies like Apple.
To paraphrase the music teacher at my current school, classes like jazz or concert band embodied the principles of challenge-based learning long before anyone realized how profitable it would become. These buzz phrases are endless, and there will be more. All are fads, and every one of them is, in essence, some variation of the old fashioned “Three R’s.” Take the “Four Cs,” one of education’s latest innovations in 21st century learning. My professors stressed their importance throughout much of my graduate coursework, and for those unfamiliar with this groundbreaking material, they consist of critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity.
I am an avid proponent of creativity and collaboration in the classroom, and am one of four lead teachers working on a pilot program that stresses those attributes at the ninth-grade level. But what are critical thinking and communication if not the ability to read and write? Where is plain-old literacy amid any of this new educational jargon? To be literate simply means, “(of a person) able to read and write.” While we do have new media on which to do this, the fundamental skills are still the same.
Before we fly into the future, slinging iPads into the hands of students in the name of “learning” while doing none of the necessary research to reveal whether or not that device actually improves their ability to comprehend a paragraph, we must slow down. If the literacy of college students is on the decline, as researchers have documented over the last decade, we need to reassess our trajectory.
Literacy is not sexy, but it is necessary. It won’t make Apple and Google millions, but it will enable our kids to learn from books on computer science or engineering. Practically speaking, since college now often costs more than $120,000, it will enable them to do the same with a job description, and follow up with a convincing cover letter.
Whether the higher-ups realize it or not, literacy is the only 21st century skill worth learning.
Michael O’Keefe is a boarding school English teacher and football coach. A native New Englander, he has worked in both northeast Ohio and the Mid-Atlantic region for the last five years.
