I began this entry yesterday, wanting to get it over with early. But the entry dragged on and I had to go to meetings. The entry concerns an article making the rounds of the faculty email boxes on my campus, and elsewhere, I imagine. The article is a gloss or exposition of Thomas Bertonneau's essays posted at the "Pope Center"that bring considerable intellectual weight and scholarly insight to convince us that college students are stupid. When I left off, I was just about to examine some of the key claims of the article: [Edited for clarity]
Let's begin with the thesis of Bertonneau/Cheaney:
Bertonneau has identified specific factors that indicate the rapid shift of our society to "post-literacy." His students' papers display some characteristics of oral cultures, such as a tendency to substitute literal meanings for metaphorical and a dependence on phonetic spelling to the extent that most don't even run their papers through spell check. But at the same time, they lack the mental disciplines of an oral culture. The original audiences of Homer and Virgil could at least keep characters and events straight, but Bertonneau's students are always confusing Aeneas with Odysseus, Aphrodite with Athena, Troy with Greece.
Is it just me, or is that a bizarre set of claims? First, as I said before, we have the commitment to epochal history: we are rapidly shifting to "post-literacy." This may well be true if by "literacy" we mean people sitting around with books. One could also argue that we are rapidly shifting to hyper-literacy, slowly shifting to non-literacy, slowly shifting to rapid shifts among various forms of literacy, or breaking into fragmented parts that are literate in different ways. But Bertonneau isn't happy, apparently, with just recognizing that literacy is taking different shapes. In fact, as a scholar of "Western Heritage," he apparently knows full well what this means: we're returning to an oral culture. See, if it's not literacy, it's orality.
This is drivel and a scholar of western heritage should know better. First, the epochal nonsense is a deliberate misunderstanding of and insensitivity toward the particular needs, strengths, and weaknesses of the students this guy faces in the classroom every day. I shudder to think that at Oswego, students walk in the door to find Prof. Bertonneau who, without having to listen to a word they say, knows more about them than they will ever be able to discover (given their inadequacy in the whole soul-searching thing): that they are "post-literate." These epochal notions might satisfy those committed to a particularly restrictive, homogenized, lineal/linear, and (as one commenter on my earlier post suggested) bigoted vision of Western Heritage, but they do not do justice to our experiences, our students, or to the task we face as teachers. It's a cheap historicism that ultimately harms not just our students but the institutions that are trying to educate them. It is no surprise to me that Berteonneau's articles are published on the profoundly anti-faculty Pope Center web site: they envision a certain kind of faculty member (most of his self-serving posts are devoted to his own classroom strategies) teaching a certain kind of student, and we well know that there are other ways of teaching (even "Western Heritage") and other ways of learning.
Their test-taking training in high school taught them to take note of dates but not to make sense of how they use them. Though saturated with movies and TV, they lack a basic notion of cause-and-effect and logical consequence basic to stories.
Not only are they post-literate, they are post-rational. Cause and effect have not yet sunk in. That is, from Bertonneau/Cheaney's perspective, it is quite possible that students arrive without a notion of cause-and-effect. That is, in classical terms, they are mad. Insane. And this is how the genre sees students generally: stupid, insane, mad, coddled, drug-addled, losers. And forget the Socratic hope that it's our job to adequately recognize their shortcomings and then try--through conversation--to teach their way out of it.
But really: how the hell does he think he knows this? His classes at Oswego start to sour, his notes and cheat sheets don't quite connect with the co-eds the way they used to, and so his students are incapable of soul-searching, they resemble insane people, and they are post-literate. What is wrong here? What could be the matter? He teaches his class--Western Heritage, for gods' sake--as well as can be expected, and the students can't seem to count backwards for all dates occurring before the Birth of Christ and then upwards for all dates after the Birth of Christ. Because being a full fledged member of Western Heritage--having that special inheritance common to us Westerners, or "Europeans," or "White Folk"--means that you are well aware that for a little while there, time went backwards and then, praise god, went forwards again. And if you don't know that time went backwards and then forwards (in the estimation of a monk named Dionysus), then you lack a basic notion of cause and effect.
Finally, it's worth remembering that the tale Bertonneau tells about a decline in literacy is quite simply false, and since he and his expositor repeat it despite knowing full well that it is false, it is also a lie. That is, there is no time in history when we as a people or a nation or a culture were "literate" in any meaningful sense, and certainly not to the extent that we can now point to our students and say that they are "post-literate." As Michael Berubé points out (in "What's LIberal about the Liberal Arts?" and elsewhere), the share of the "public" that is "literate" in the sense that Bertonneau apparently means it has always been exceedingly small. For the most part, we aren't big readers and never have been. Of course people used to read newspapers, magazines, and books to find out about the world, but that's because they didn't have the internet, cable television, and so on. And I'm one who happens to think that reading on the internet is also "reading." What is most malicious about Bertonneau's argument (and about Cheaney's deployment of it) is that it uses a half-baked claim about post-literacy in order to indict students, Universities, departments, programs, faculty members, and the entire profession (the thrust of the Pope Center), and people who cannot actually read (administrators and chief financial officers) use these specious arguments to cut faculty and programs that students need.
Bertonneau's expositor continues:
And they are impervious to correction, as if it never occurred to them that some of their ideas are wrong. "Self-Entitled College Students," a study conducted by researchers at UC-Irvine, reveals a growing conviction among young adults that simply showing up in class and reading the assigned texts should earn a B at least, no matter what they actually remembered and learned. Though this may seem like too much self-confidence, it's just the opposite: Their confidence is not in self but in outward criteria. A lower-than-expected grade is not a wake-up call for diligence but an alarm that their fragile self-esteem has been breached.
First, the study (available here) does not claim that there is a growing conviction of entitlement. Indeed, it makes very clear that longitudinal data is lacking, and that more studies need to be conducted. Anecdotally, faculty members believe this. The study was designed to see whether there even is such a thing as "self-entitlement" among college students. As this conviction of entitlement seems an apt description of what happens at Ivy League Institutions (whose admissions policies for decades--centuries--sustained that sense of entitlement), I really don't see the problem here.
Unless what offends is the fact that at our state institutions we see students who are not from privileged backgrounds, who do not have the same preparation or material advantages, who have been told they are stupid too many times to count, suddenly adopting the sense of entitlement we really ought to reserve for those who deserve to feel entitled. I get the sneaking suspicion that this is what is at stake.
Indeed there is--I admit--a sense of entitlement. Many of our students (young and old, by the way) do indeed believe this. And I suppose that means that Bertonneau and others are under such incredible, overwhelming social pressure, fighting such a tide of resentment and stupidity, that it's all that they can DO to keep their Western standards in tact. Oh, the humanity.
I propose the following solution for Bertonneau/Cheaney: when a student does bad work, give a bad grade. Any problem with that? To complain about students who expect better grades is simply unprofessional and sad. Give them what they deserve, listen to them when they complain, suck up the bad evaluations you will get, and move on. Forget it. Do your job. To do otherwise while writing silly articles for the Pope Center is nothing less than bad faith. Nothing in the study by UCI suggests that this is a bad strategy. In fact, it lays the "blame" for the sense of self-entitlement at the feet of parents (for being too demanding and for placing too much emphasis on self-esteem) for the most part.
Weirdly, though, Bertenneau/Cheaney continues:
Another characteristic of oral cultures is an incomplete sense of self.
Huh? First, this seems to imply that the self-entitlement problem is a characteristic of oral cultures. I'm no scholar of oral cultures, but having read my share of Homer, some of the ancient Pali texts (records of an oral tradition), and various other remnants of oral cultures the world over, I swear I can't remember anyone accusing oral cultures of excessive self-entitlement generated by an incomplete sense of self. (Though there is a lurking Nietzcheanism here: that the priestly overcoming of the Greeks was a reaction to the Greek sense of self-entitlement!).
But more importantly, it's simply wrong. Homeric characters do not exhibit an incomplete sense of self. They have no sense of self whatsoever. Interiority simply does not occur to the Homeric Greeks, and arguably does not occur anywhere in ancient literature until arguably the Hellenic period and some of the Stoic texts, from which Augustine draws inspiration. And even if it were the case, the argument appears to be this: kids these days are post-literate, which means they must therefore be oral. But they aren't good-oral, they're bad-oral. They could have been Homer, but they've actually regressed. A reverse epochalism. What comes next in this reverse-epochal apocalyptic history? It can only be the lamest bronze age you've ever seen. "Kids these days are post-oral. But they can't make a bronze cup for shit."
Finally:
The task of the intellect, according to William James, is to sharpen the "perceptual blur of reality." Blurry selves can only reflect a blurry world, and Professor Bertonneau fears that the future of most of his students will be driven by gimmicks, devices, and fads rather than enduring principles. The outlook may not be as bleak as he
says, but we're getting too many of these reports from the educational front to ignore.
So much for literacy. James' claim about the intellect is a claim about the intellect's job: it's a psychological claim. The world is a blur because that is what the world is, and the intellect sharpens it as such (unless, of course, you're mad). A sharp mind no less than a blurry mind will reflect a blurry world because the world is blurry. Our task is to help students develop critical distance from that blur, not to arrest its movement or return again to "enduring principles"
Apparently, William James's views on "enduring principles" didn't make it into Cheaney's edition of Bartlett's. In fact, all I might have done instead of going on at length in this entry is to encourage you to do what the post-literate Cheaney did not/cannot do: actually read James Here's James: "...there is absolutely nothing ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals" (William James, "What Makes a Life Significant," in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (U. of Chicago Press: 1977), 656). Our students are legitimately engrossed in their ideals. The come to us looking for affirmation of their legitimacy. And while we cannot and should not give it to them, we can affirm their presence and the hard work they've actually done to form such a sense of ideals, a sense of themselves, as radically insufficient as it may turn out to be. But that's not part of our "Western Heritage," is it. It's part of our heritage if we're the umpteenth legacy admit to Yale. But that sense of self is not for you.
If Bertonneau's students are "driven by gimmicks, devices, and fads" ("texts" were gimmicks to the pre-literate. Books are devices. And Bertonneau himself cops to using the gimmick of the cheat-sheet. And lo, students still write crap), then maybe we are finally free of all this epochal nonsense. That is, maybe students are starting to figure out how to learn on their own, quite without the whining pedantry of Bertonneau and Bauerlein. Maybe some of them will download that lecture on Augustine from Stanford or MIT sometime and listen to someone who isn't going to humiliate them talk about ideas that matter. Bertonneau has already decided that we are in the era of post-literacy, thereby rendering himself and his febrile attachment to Western Heritage obsolete. Students resemble madmen, higher education is their asylum, and western heritage is shot to hell.
Look: I'm not defending bad writing, and I will give a D to a student who can't give an account of Descartes' first meditation. But I will not assume that my students already know how to count with roman numerals, that they understand antiquated dating systems, or that they understand what it means to read with care, precision, and a critical mind the texts left behind from our progenitors, our forefathers, etc. I assume that students are students and that they can learn as long as we don't sit them down and bark at them: "I know you: you're post-literate." I value "great books" and believe they should be taught. But why would anyone assume that because a student can barely write or can't figure out that the Trojan horse was brought TO Troy and not taken FROM Troy that the problem is post-literacy, arrogant self-esteem, or a lack of enduring ideals?
This "Students are Stupid" genre is not only intellectually vacuous and professionally irresponsible, it is dangerous. For it reinforces the idea that we can open access to universities all we want, and students will never really "take" to it, that the task of education in our state schools is futile, wasted on the post-literate, and that an education that really reaches students souls is literally a waste of time in this post-literate age. Because these students do not have souls, and if they had them, they wouldn't know what to do with them.