Thursday, March 10, 2011

Teaching of Composition Now a Dumbed-Down Enterprise


Socialist Evolution
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(excerpt)

“Over the course of the last 30 to 40 years, composition teaching has been taken over by a kind of cadre of theorists who keep coming up with new, different sorts of social science-based ideas of how students learn. They have banished literature from the writing classroom. So instead of teaching composition being a practice that older, more experienced writers share with young novices in the field, it’s become almost a sort of pseudo-scientific discipline in which they’re manipulated into learning how to do things according to the scheme that the theorists have developed.

The way we’re teaching freshmen composition, we are basically steeping the students in the world they’re already in, the student world of texting and twittering and pop culture and that kind of thing, so they’re trapped in it. They never get out of it. It’s as if they are being kept in an extended childhood, insofar as the content of their texting and their Facebook pages and so on.

If all you’ve ever read are popular accounts of emerging issues - and it doesn’t matter if it’s someone on the left or right – if all you know is what people are saying right now with a specific political agenda, you don’t know the sources of Western civilization, Western politics, morals, religion, that these current commentators and politicians are trying to reinforce, change, make an impact of some kind on. So [the student] can’t really bring a learned judgment to it. If you haven’t read Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics and Cicero’s speeches and people like Locke and Hobbes, people like Edmund Burke, then you don’t have a basis for deciding between [national political candidates].

In order to be educated, you have to share a common fund of knowledge, an outlook, a set of skills, with other educated men and women.”

R.V. Young is a professor of English at North Carolina State University.

The lost art of teaching English composition



Via Bernhard

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