“What, Me Read?” Is Back

About six months ago, Clarion Call ran my essay on college-student literacy in three parts under the title, “What, Me Read?” In that series I described the reading and writing efforts of a middle segment of students in my “Western Heritage” course. Their task was to understand a few classic narratives, such as Homer’s Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid, and to react to them, in writing, on the occasion of the final examination at the end of the semester. I noted the difficulties of comprehension that seem to dog the efforts of these students and commented on their laborious—sometimes unintentionally comical—attempts to codify in writing what the authors seemed to be saying, directly or indirectly, to their audience.

Among other observations, I remarked that many students seem to stumble badly even in making sense of simple narrative: first this happens and then that happens and so forth—sequences that they could not report back accurately. I also remarked a pronounced and pervasive literalism, the other side of which is an almost total failure to understand metaphors and symbols. (I invite those interested in the details to revisit Parts I through III of “What, Me Read?” here, here, and here.)

In this follow-up, I want to account for the reader response to “What, me Read,” which ran strong. Apparently, thousands of people read my series (more than 6,500 at least looked at Part I), and many wrote to me or to the Pope Center with comments. I received something like thirty lengthy responses, all but three of them positive. I cannot quote them all, but will sample a few typical responses in what follows.

It is a cliché of current social and political discourse that ours is nowadays a divided, even a polarized, nation in many ways. Like most clichés, this one embodies a kernel of truth. One of the divisions that now afflicts and will increasingly afflict our society is the division between the fully literate and the functionally or marginally literate, with the former dwindling away to a minority while the latter become a dominant presence on the cultural scene.

Reflecting the rise of what I call post-literacy (borrowing a coinage from my friend John Harris), the majority of respondents to the “What, Me Read?” series were people, like me, of middle age, whose schooling occurred before the precipitate collapse of public education at the end of the 1960s. (I graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1972.) Without knowing for sure, I would guess that my respondents were college-educated, and that during their student careers they took seriously the liberal side of their higher studies. This preparation puts them in a position to discern the differences between their own competency in written language and the competency of the younger people whom they meet in conducting the daily business of their lives.

George Copeland, for example, whose message left out his address, shares my anguish over the disappearance of real literacy and agrees with my argument about the cause or causes. Copeland made an important contribution to the discussion of post-literacy when he picked up on the alienation of men, in particular, from written language. Men do seem to have more difficulty in reading and writing than women, although the samples in the first three parts of “What, Me Read?” draw equally on the examination booklets of men and women. As to the males: Having become disengaged from reading by the insipid K-12 curriculum, Copeland wrote, “many boys today see nothing for them in college, and so they are avoiding it.” I would add that some are avoiding college even though they are technically enrolled in a degree-program and might be more or less regular attendees in their classes. They simply are not spiritually present.

Copeland went on to note, accurately, that, “Female matriculation has been increasing for the last twenty years or so, and the only conclusion I can glean is that boys are avoiding college for more rewarding activities.” Copeland offers the hypothesis that “the students you wish you had are manning arc-welders and nail guns, out in the real world.” The male students whose immature literacy my essay describes, Copeland offers, are “boys who are not self-aware enough nor courageous enough to chart a different course.”

South Carolina reader Janice Phillips wrote with refreshing honesty that she, too, might have had some trouble fully coming to terms with some of the items on my reading list, “but,” as she put it, “not nearly as much as your students.” Sometimes, Phillips reported, she still today falls asleep while reading, but this, of course, is no reflection on her literacy; it is merely a reflection of the too-busy and all-too-exhausting lives that we now live. “But I read,” she stated, “nonetheless.” Indeed, she added, “I love to read.”

Phillip’s invocation of “love” is entirely to the point: for the genuinely literate, whether they struggle with Homer or Shakespeare or take the great books in stride, bring to the activity of reading a passion. Real reading requires an exercise of the imagination—and just like physical exercise, intellectual exercise is exhilarating. There is a reader’s equivalent of the runner’s rush, or second wind.

Phillips, who works in the South Carolina Department of Corrections, said, “For several years, I was the person to whom the inmates would write when they had a complaint about their medical care.” Unsurprisingly, the inmate letters contained many basic-language mistakes and mis-locutions; surprisingly these resembled the ones in my samples of student writing. Also surprisingly, Phillips discovered in the files many items of incompetent writing “by nurses, social workers, and doctors.” Phillips came to a close with, “Thank God my parents got us to reading when we were kids.”

Chuck Edwards (no address), who holds a degree in French literature, referred me to C. S. Lewis’s autobiography, remarking on the daunting rigor of the requirements that Lewis had to meet even before he entered the university.

Peter Petite, writing from North Carolina, noted that the problems my essay describes stem not only from the shabby pedagogy of so-called public education, but also from similar instructional confusion in some of the private and parochial schools, where one might hope that the situation would be better. About a “conservative Christian school” in the city where he lives, and where he was teaching until lately, Petite wrote that, “the inability of the school’s administration to drive any stake in the ground with respect to requirements was nearly my undoing.” All too often, “having fun and pleasing as many constituents as possible in order to keep the funding coming [have] trumped all other considerations.” Like that portion of my students whom my own essay considers, Petite discovered in his classroom students who “had been neither taught nor required to think in a manner approaching sustained clarity and rigor.”

As predictable in the existing political climate “What, Me Read?”—in in addition to eliciting many affirmations of its diagnosis—also provoked denunciation in zealously partisan language.

It happened this way. Janie B. Cheaney, a columnist, picked up on “What, Me Read?” in a piece entitled “Boastful Dunces.” In one of those flurries of Internet multiplication, Cheaney’s column made its way into the email queues of hundreds or perhaps thousands of humanities faculty members around the country.

Cheaney’s column generated what can only be called a screed by an anonymous blogger at the leftwing Web site Daily Kos, who, I emphasize, had not read the original Clarion Call installments, but only Cheaney’s summary. Nevertheless, the nameless complainant is certain that “What, Me Read?” belongs to the “genre,” as he calls it, of “diagnostic diatribes” and “critiques [of] postmodernity.” “These articles,” Mr. Nameless, asserts, are “characterized by… unabashed hatred of most (never ‘all’) students who are in our classes,” whom the writers accuse of being “dunces… undisciplined… confused… inured to cause and effect… immune to logic… and stupid.”

Readers may affirm the inaccuracy of these skulking asseverations about something their writer has confessedly not read by revisiting the three parts of “What, Me Read?” But on two points let me be clear: I called no student “stupid,” nor would I; nor do I “hate” my students—a piece of casual slander. Mr. Nameless compounds his ungentlemanliness by calling the Pope Center “execrable,” on no grounds whatsoever, and by judging that the title of my course, which I in any case merely inherited, is abnormall.

The reaction to the blog by its readers, however, differed noticeably in tone from the blog itself. One party wrote: “In fact, a lot of students entering college wouldn’t have passed my 10th grade English class. This is a systematic problem and deserves to be addressed systematically.” Another party wrote: “You can see why educators who are capable of teaching at college level would get frustrated, impatient, and angry and try compulsively to diagnose why things just aren’t working, if this is at all typical, in which case I think it deserves serious diagnostic effort as a syndrome and not just leaving professors to struggle with it individually.” And yet another wrote, referring to a sample of the student prose I had reproduced: “This really is pretty bad writing for a college student in a humanities class, particularly if it was from the end of the term.”

Of course, one ingredient in the complex event of post-literacy is the hysteria with which a politicized education establishment reacts, not only to measured, critical observations about student achievement, but also to the non-culturally-self-hating idea of a “Western Heritage,” or a “Western Literature,” or simply “a canon of classics,” in which well-prepared students might take nourishing interest.

I once gave a talk at a Pope Center event, on a panel that I shared with the redoubtable Shakespearian Paul Cantor, in which I took as my topic “The Death of Eros.” The essential failure in modern education at all levels, I argued, is a failure to awaken the passion of students for their own intellectual—Plato would say spiritual—development, which, in the Western literate context, can really only come about through encounters with the Great Books. Plato said that a properly attuned Eros, or passion, was what drove the philosopher, not to possess wisdom, which he could never do, but to seek it.

I do not pretend to be a scientist, or to make scientifically certain claims about anything. As an honest and educated person, however, and as someone who has heeded the call of his own passion in becoming educated, I do feel compelled to say what I see. What I see, in my own classroom and in the public forum, is a decreasingly literate, increasingly coarse and culturally “flat” world. My education was good for me. I fail to see why it should not be good for my students. It is telling that those who defend post-literacy defend it anonymously. When I write, I sign my name.