Last week, Rosemary Dewar highlighted a shift in attitude among current high school students. Apparently, this demographic “wants to jumpstart their careers as soon as possible” and they’ve realized that amassing “tens of thousands of dollars in debt before receiving any on-the-job training” isn’t the way to do it. Later on, Dewar calls attention to the educational implications of this change, claiming that teachers will now need “to justify their [courses’] utility” [emphasis added] to college students faced with price tags growing more exorbitant by the year.
To those who value fiscal responsibility, this fresh perspective makes sense. Why would an 18-year-old waste time and money on a product that provides no guarantees of future career-enhancing opportunities? Competitive alternatives to traditional education clearly exist, and it should come as no surprise that kids are smart enough to seek them out.
But, as much as I admire any teenager intelligent and bold enough to break from what’s become a deeply embedded cultural norm, I can’t help worrying about the perceived practicality of high school literature courses (e.g., the ones I teach). And because my current school costs more than many colleges and universities, I think it’s time for a self-audit.
Does examining the “utility” of English class in the context of the present political chaos seem irrelevant? Probably, and that’s kind of my point. Let me explain.
Since I began teaching, a significant portion of my time has been spent justifying the content of my curriculum. This shouldn’t be a shocking revelation, because at some point in our academic careers, most of us have asked questions like, “Why am I reading Mary Shelley?” “Who cares about ‘Candide’?” “How will memorizing Shakespeare get me a job after college?”
These queries are fair, and my responses to them have varied over the past six years. Right now, I usually say something like: “Reading fiction allows us to explore the human condition, and if you want to learn more about yourself, examine the life choices made by the characters in these books.” Admittedly, the answer doesn’t leap off the page. But more importantly, any English teacher who lives and dies by the number of students actually reading every word of assigned work is destined for, at best, a life filled with disappointment. The idea that the English classroom does more to extinguish students’ desire to read has been well-documented, and I’m doing my best to stop the bleeding. So if I can foster a healthy respect for Voltaire, Shelley, and Shakespeare, the most significant battle has been won.
But what about the other half of these courses: writing? Shouldn’t it be easy to justify the “utility” of strong written communication skills, regardless of one’s career path? On paper, it should be, but teaching the most practical style of writing means making judgments. And here’s where things get political.
Seventeen years ago, David Foster Wallace published an essay in Harper’s titled, “Authority and American Usage.” In it, he reviewed Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Thrilling stuff, right?
In about 20 pages of tiny, double-columned font, Wallace details what teachers charged with the task of writing instruction refer to as the “Usage Wars.” The ongoing conflict involves two parties: the Prescriptivists and the Descriptivists. The former is primarily comprised of conservative lexicographers, while the latter attracts liberal academic linguists.
To briefly summarize, Prescriptivists believe, in Garner’s own words, “that certain uses of language are better than others,” while Descriptivists claim that “the most valid pronouncements about language are based on how people actually use the language.” One side seeks to set a definitive bar for “correctness” (i.e., Standard Written English); the other doesn’t think such a standard is possible, because a native speaker can never be wrong.
If you can’t see where this is headed, consider this foreboding passage from early in Wallace’s essay:
[Emphasis added.]
If my reading is accurate, then Wallace, all the way back in 2001, suggested that many people now over the age of 50 were taught to write not for the purposes of communication, but rather self-expression, with little adherence to any set of “rules.” If this seems pedagogically misguided, that’s because it is. So how has it become the dominant ideology in English curricula for decades?
My guess is that, as Wallace tacitly acknowledges throughout the piece, the Usage Wars have produced the same “exhausted majority” revealed by our “culture wars.” There aren’t enough English teachers around today who are equipped to charge ahead in battle against the Descriptivist monoculture. If you think I’m being dramatic, know that Wallace had difficulty doing just that. Included in his essay is the self-proclaimed “spiel” he used as a professor when advocating for “SWE’s utility” in front of students who didn’t grow up using it.
While the argument is blunt, it’s also beautifully rhetorical. In moments that would appear offensive to members of the extreme academic left, he posits that anyone, regardless of “race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use [Standard Written English].” He continues, citing all the “totally ass-kicking SWE” that’s been written by the Baldwins and Angelous of the world, and how “black judges and politicians and journalists and doctors and teachers communicate professionally in SWE.” Every one of them, according to Wallace, “realized at some point that they had to learn it and become able to write fluently in it, and so they did.”
These words, nearly two decades old, received “an Official Complaint” and an accusation of racial insensitivity. Imagine them appearing on the internet today and the backlash they’d receive. Professors like Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, et al. have been shouted down for less.
But I must make my point. To that end, dwell on a few admittedly desperate questions: Is it politically incorrect, in 2018, to teach students how to write using elements of Standard Written English? Can we give levelheaded Prescriptivists a voice in the Usage Wars again? Can teachers provide a few rules to help foster coherent composition? Can I please tell my students that they should write not solely to explore themselves, but also to communicate rational ideas about difficult social problems to others who might disagree?
If none of that is possible, I’m not sure what can be done to quell the violent rhetoric spewing from both sides of the political spectrum. Writing only for ourselves, with no concern for an audience’s comprehension, helped create this tumultuous discursive climate.
Obviously, I believe in the utility of my subject, but others don’t — and it’s not difficult to see why.
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.
