Presidents have preferred quoting Shakespeare, though Mr. Obama has yet to do so in public.  Lincoln was enchanted by Macbeth; Jefferson and Adams ventured to Stratford-upon-Avon together.  Though he hasn’t quoted the Bard in public, Barry Edelstein’s recent NYTimes article points out

His closest brush was in his Inaugural Address, where his evocative phrase “this winter of our hardship” glanced at Shakespeare’s “winter of our discontent” from “Richard III.”

The step from literary allusion to direct quotation is small, however, especially since there is no shortage of Shakespeare with which Mr. Obama might address the country’s challenges. For example:

On the trouble in the Gulf of Aden, he could say this from “Antony and Cleopatra”: “I must / Rid all the sea of pirates.” He could quote from “Henry IV, Part I” on limiting Wall Street bonuses: “A little / More than a little is by much too much.” When he cashiers the next Fortune 500 C.E.O., some “Pericles” might come in handy: “We would purge the land of these drones, that rob the bee of her honey.”

What Mr. Obama needs is not winters and bees.  He needs Milton. Milton gives both poetry and prose, and it is the directness of his politics in prose that might make him most fitting today.

Obama’s insistence to be reasonable, speak clearly, and remain overtly calm speaks to the power of the mind. Milton describes “One who brings”

A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (Paradise Lost, 1.252-257)

Of course, it’s Satan speaking above, which might be one reason presidents avoid Milton: He makes the devil so alluring.

The President’s own style of leadership, which he says rests on transparency and communication between individuals and institutions, might well benefit from this excerpt from Areopagitica:

For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good as theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house to house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing publish to the world what his opinion is, what his reasons, and wherefore that which is now thought cannot be sound?

The quiet backdoor dealings (“privily from house to house”) that became iconic of the previous administration seem for the moment to have given way to “openly…writing…to the world”.  In these first 100 days of office, we have heard more than ever before of the importance of communicating with the public the workings of offices that they themselves fund.

But still, Milton might be uneasy with my praising loudly the new president.  He might direct me to a passage on the fallibility of man, which, considering the fate of our last popular democratic president, we all might be wise to keep in mind.  Milton’s God describes in Book 3 of his great epic, how Satan,  Adam & Eve fall from Grace:

I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all th’ Ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood & them who faild;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. (98-102)

Mind your freeness to fall, Mr. President.  And for the most compelling literary advice on how to keep on your feet, read Milton.  Not Shakespeare.

In the recent issue of English Journal, Viv Ellis writes about why teaching toward understanding sexual identity is important in English education.  He tells a powerful story of a student of his who was cruelly beaten to death, having been labeled gay.  Ellis pinpoints his student’s death as a turning point in his teaching English and sexual identity. It’s a brief piece with a readable balance of the scholarly, the personal, and the pedagogical.

Especially compelling for me was not only Ellis’ astuteness and candor, but also the way he justifies teaching literature at all.  He writes, “Personal growth–in terms of conceptual development, criticality, imagination, socialibility, empathy, morality, and ethics–may be presently an unfashionable phrase but it presists as an ideal for the institution of schooling, and English has an important role to play in the pursuit of this goal.”

In a time when the humanities are losing funding and support, and some teachers are being paid more because of the subject they teach (math and science teachers in Georgia are slated to start out at 5th year teaching pay), I find Ellis’ matter-of-fact defense for teaching literature a breath of fresh air that is currently all too rare.

Literature’s power rests on imagination.  With all the new technological advances, literary writers have to step it up a notch.  Bemoaning the iPhone is hardly effective:

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage. (It’s Odysseus, can someone look up the way to Ithaca? Use the “no Sirens” route.)

Socrates bemoaned a technological advancement (which we now call writing…His student Plato thought writing quite brilliant, which is a good thing considering we wouldn’t know who either Socrates or Plato was if they weren’t written about). The Church was certain the printing press would be the ruin of biblical interpretation.  We know what critics have said about TV.

Technology is part of humanity.  What’s more, little techy devices are the products of imagination.  And it is imagination that is at the root of the quote above.  Authors need their readers to be imaginative.  And they are right to expect imagination of their readers.  But, though technology is the product of imagination and authors need it, I fear imagination is what is most likely to be lost in our technological times.

I’ve just finished reading Grown Up Digital.  In it, the author glosses over the loss of literature and imagination.  He focuses on tangible and pragmatic ends to justify the value of Internet culture and social action: students who sift through information and organize protests against corporations.  OK.  But, let’s not abandon a thoughtful discussion of imagination.

My concern, as I have voiced elsewhere, is that imagination will be devalued to make room for rampant pragmatism.  I believe deeply that there should be meaningful ends to things–I’ve also decried the abstract ridiculousness of academic writing, for example–but imagination still merits cultivation and exploration.  A world without literature–can you imagine?

Literature is losing the fight.  By “the fight” I mean two bookish scuffles: one against literature’s digital counterparts described in Click and Jane, an article in the Times Magazine a couple weeks ago; and the other being a century-old battle in which literature has tried to maintain some place of legitimacy in American education.

As the author (and mother) of Click and Jane notes, her three-year-old son doesn’t mistake her Blackberry for a book.  For him, “the only time he describes what he and I do together as ‘reading’ is when we’re sitting with a clutch of pages bound between covers, open in front of us like a hymnal.”  He enjoys playing on book-like web sites for kids, but he doesn’t dare call it reading.  Importantly, the place of reading literature in schools is becoming increasingly complex as students and researchers spend more time engaged with various new/online literacies.  Things are not looking good for literature.  It’s track record, after all, looks fairly feeble.

Literature in schools hasn’t ever been able to defend itself the way other subjects of study have. Other subjects–physics, Spanish, history, for instance–have specific content and methods that, if push comes to shove, have some practical value. (A student can say, “I can send a man to the moon” or “I can communicate with others” or “I can better partake in the political system”). Utility drives education more often than many educators like to admit.  Students know this, of course.  Their frustrated cries of “Why do we have to do this?” are cries of pragmatists. Education loves pragmatists, so long as they do their work.

Literature isn’t practical. In fact, for much of its teaching in America, teaching literature has been justified under the canopy of Developing Character and Culture.  A weak defense. There is no value in teaching literature. There is worth, perhaps, but not value.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines value as “That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be an equivalent for something else; a fair or adequate equivalent or return.”  The literary experience is not a commodity.  In fact, attempts to demonstrate the practical or quantifiable value of teaching literature have resulted in its being defined in terms of reading skills or as a necessary companion to writing.  (Incidentally, writing has seldom had so difficult a time finding approval in academia. Programs and departments might argue over whose responsibility it is to teach writing, but none would question the importance of it.)  To this day, the New York State Regents exam as well as the AP Exam in Literature value literature in a particular way.  It is something to be parsed, like a dead frog in biology class.  Poke it. Prod it. Cut it up and discard it.

Worth is different. In addition to definitions of economy and markets, worth also conveys something more: “The character or standing of a person in respect of moral and intellectual qualities; high personal merit or attainments.”  With this definition, we start to approach the unspeakable nature of literary experience.  Words like “moral” and “intellectual” float in the ether.  A teacher would be hard pressed to score morality (though, unfortunately, they might do a more confident job with intellect!).

There is no reason whatsoever to argue for the value of literature.  Nevertheless, schools do indeed have a responsibility to ensure certain practical communication skills are taught.  Why not, then, give literature its own course of study?  Let there be a course on Efferent Reading or Communicative Arts, which focuses on the practical and necessary skills of information gathering, critiquing, and presenting.  Then, separately, study literature with an eye toward the intangible, immeasurable aesthetic effects it can create with imaginative readers.  What would be lost in such a curricular approach?

What’s more, the recent trend of using literature to teach reading skills–or, I would argue, even to emulate authors in students’ own writing–is distinctly non-literary.  It prevents any hope of aesthetic experience or, as Applebee writes in his Tradition and Reform, it privileges students’ experiences with literature instead of their experiences through literature.  Teaching literature resists evaluation, so do the students’ literary experiences through literature.  We read literature, to put it simply, because it’s worth it.

I can’t stop thinking about content and form.  Hardly the thoughts I would choose to have burrowed into the Unforgettable realm of my mind.  But that is exactly where the age-old pair has ensconced themselves.  They will not leave me.  So, I shall escort them out in this posting.  I hope.

In the last two postings, I’ve been trying to make sense of how both Gerald Graff and Laurel Richardson’s views of writing—in terms of content and form—relate to each other.  At first, they seem to be unrelated to me.  Richardson calls for us to consider writing as thinking; to write is to think.  She seems to be responding especially to the notion that in order to write one must know beforehand what one wishes to say.  In addition, Richardson thinks that the forms in which we write help to create knowledge themselves.  There are some things that one might only think of when trying to write a monologue, or in a strict poetic form.  Richardson’s position resists the trend in academia to write in a particular style, an opaque form that makes its content that much harder to understand.  Gerald Graff has a similar view, which he calls Arguespeak—the cryptic language in which scholars speak and write, and a way of communicating in which students are often denied explicit instruction.

Initially, it seems that Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say method of academic writing is in line with Richardson: they propose a form in which students can write, a form that ensures students’ ideas will remain focused and cogent.  But, there is a difference between the Graff-Birkenstein method and Richardson’s call for writing as thinking.  The difference is this: Richardson suggests formal conventions like genre, poetic rhythm, or characterization; the Graff-Birkenstein method gives students the language to think, isolating the core of a student’s idea.  This distinction is important because it sheds light on the inadequacy of my terms, content and form.  And especially form.  What is the difference between the conventional form of a genre—lyric poetry, for example—and the providing of (some) exact language with which students should think?  What effect does thinking in someone else’s sentences have on students’ own thoughts?  While it might ensure that they preserve cogency, how will it effect aspects of writing like voice, for example?

To be clear, Graff and Birkenstein suggest that after students master the basic idea—how to weave others’ ideas into their own—they are free to alter templates to be more original.  In this sense, the Graff-Birkenstein method is one way to train students to think a certain kind of way—a way that does not come easily to some (or many) students.  This is said with great clarity by two graduate students at University of Wisconsin-Madison who, addressing a colleague’s concern that the They Say/I Say method is too formulaic, write: “It seemed to us that our colleague had conflated Graff and Birkenstein’s transparency with a sort of rote, mechanistic method of learning that reduced the complexity of writing to a set of skills that could be grasped and implemented easily.” I agree.  (I wonder if I myself, in my first previous few postings, have fallen into this trap of rash opinion-making: mistaking clarity for glibness; treating content and form so separately; suggesting that Graff was either an education or and English professor.) As with most tools and methods, this one could be of great value to the writing teacher.  That is, as long as it is one tool among others.  A course in which this is the only way of writing—or, a teacher who teaches it as the “right” way, the only way—would be limiting students to only one way of thinking and expressing ideas.  And, unfortunately, as often happens when administrators wish to implement standardized pedagogy, it is quite possible that what would be a valuable tool might be misused as a magic wand.  This is precisely what happened with 6-Traits of Writing, Reading/Writing Workshops, and even Do Nows.  They Say/I Say is a valuable way to help students organize their ideas.  But, administrators must remember the most important word of that sentence: a.

Sociologist Laurel Richardson thinks that writing itself is a form of inquiry.  For her, writing is not something you do only after you have figured out what you want to say.  Writing is how you think it.  In a chapter on writing as a form of inquiry (Richardson, 2000), Richardson writes that “by writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (923).   Qualitative research, she thinks, is boring.  As a result, research doesn’t get read and has no impact on the field, let alone the world.  Richardson’s tone seems hopeful when she writes that qualitative research “could be reaching wide and diverse audiences, not just devotees of individual topics or authors.  It seems foolish at best, and narcissistic and wholly self-absorbed at worst, to spend months or years doing research that ends up not being read and not making a difference to anything but the author’s career” (924).  Both Graff and Eagleton would nod their heads to this in agreement.

Richardson then goes on to describe how the wide gap between content and form came to be.  She points to the 17th century, where the “world of writing [was] divided into two separate kinds: literary and scientific” (925).  Literature became synonymous with falsehood, science with truth.  What’s more, literary writing became associated with flowery poetry while science was plain and to the point.  Despite changes in 20th century, the distinction still remains mostly intact.  This is certainly the case in education where any research done in the era of No Child Left Behind must be “science-based” (Lewis & Moorman, 2007).  Richardson concludes the chapter with a series of writing exercises and tips for graduate students and other qualitative researchers.

The Richardson you read above, however, was not always so innovative.  Her dissertation (Richardson [Walum], 1963), for examples, reads like the voiceless template writing Graff advocates. Richardson begins her dissertation, “The major concern of this thesis is the explication and testing of a theory in the sociology of knowledge. Empirically, it is a study of the relationship between production of pure mathematics and social sanctions” (1).  Her voice is frigid.  There is no “I” here.  And it doesn’t get better.  Her introductory paragraph ends with the liveliness of a funeral march: “The thesis concludes with a summary of the theoretical orientations, procedures, and findings.  The major contributions are assessed and suggestions for future research are presented” (3).  Presented?  By whom?  As we continue, in the third paragraph of Chapter II, there is some sign of life: she uses the word my.  All at once there is a sense of Laurel Richardson, that she’s wriggled loose of academe’s suffocating grip.  Before reading her small possessive adjective, you wondered if a human being wrote this at all.  That simple two-letter word invites you into her page.  That is, until she follows my with: “orientation is not to the construction of a master conceptual scheme wherein all sociological concepts are integrated into a systemic whole” (4).  Richardson of 2000 wouldn’t know Richardson of 1963 if she, well, looked in a mirror.

The point of the juxtaposition between early and late Richardson isn’t to suggest the researcher a hypocrite.  Rather, it’s to temper her recent ideas with a harsh academic reality: breaking the rules of academic writing is not as simple as it seems.  There are times in young scholars’ careers when playing by the rules is necessary for advancing.  When Richardson wrote for her three-person committee at University of Colorado, she pretended like she had never even heard of form, let alone style.  Importantly, Richardson has chronicled at length (Richardson, 1997) the struggles she has faced trying to get her work accepted by others in her field.  Her representations of research as poems and plays are gleefully received by some, but woefully read by others who see her work as nearer a wordy prank than scholarship.

It is with great caution that a young scholar bends the accepted forms of academic writing.  There are resources available and pockets of alternative-minded professors out there, but young careers are fragile things.  Both Graff and Richardson are well established in their careers; they can write however their scholarly hearts desire.  They can also encourage their advisees to break the rules, if they like.  But graduate students beware: you do so at you own risk.

Part 4 to come soon…

It’s not only a handful of scholars who treasure content over form. Content runs amok throughout academia. In his book Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, Gerald Graff (Graff, 2004) describes how the school system—universities especially, but also secondary schools—has become an exclusivist system only concerned with the perpetuation of itself. He draws attention to the problems of academic disciplines, the gibberish with which scholars speak about their scholarship, and the way in which students are forced to play a game of insincere studentship just to get through school. Unlike his contemporary Stanley Fish, who thinks that scholarship is an end unto itself and that’s the way it should be (Fish, 2008)—Graff thinks that scholars have a responsibility to make their work accessible to non-academics. Not dumbed-down, but accessible.

Students suffer because academics yatter with only other academics in mind. In what he calls the Law of Relative Invisibility of Intellectual Differences, Graff (Graff, 2004) claims that “to the non-egghead, any two eggheads, no matter how far apart, are virtually indistinguishable” (7). Despite this yen for elitism, Graff describes how intellectualism creeps into popular culture with greater and greater frequency. College-educated audiences crave intelligent entertainment. In addition, “academic ideas are increasingly popularized, not only by the media but by academic writing itself, as university presses court the wider audiences of trade houses while trade houses increasingly publish academics” (19). So, not only is the populous craving intellectualism, the universities are craving the masses.

Graff then goes on to reveal to us “one of the most closely guarded secrets that academia unwittingly keeps from students” (21). He calls it Arguespeak. For Graff, much of scholarship is a matter of making arguments. But, because students don’t know this secret, they flounder about trying to decode their instructors’ magic spells. He goes on to write that “the first step toward demystifying academia is to start being more explicit about the academic centrality of persuasive argument” (22). Academic culture is more like a volleyball game in which an idea gets tossed back and forth between players. Students, however, don’t see academics played this way because “the game is fractured into so many unconnected courses and subjects that it drops out of sight” (27). Graff sets out to change that.

In response to the popularity of Clueless in Academe, Graff and his wife wrote a guide to academic writing (Graff & Birkenstein, 2005) called They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The writing manual lays out a series of templates for students to adopt and adapt in their writing. The templates, the authors argue, help ensure that students frame their own ideas in response to the thoughts of others’, thereby ensuring that Arguespeak is at the center of their own writing. For example, one template might look like this: While some say Shakespeare’s plays are _____________, I think Shakespeare’s plays are ________________. By writing within this template, a student is sure to frame his ideas in terms of others’.

This is where Graff’s astute point about the opacity of the academy starts to wobble. His template method for academic writing ensures students’ ideas are cogent at the expense of the craft of writing itself. He pries apart thinking and writing/content and form, isolating the former and relinquishing the latter. He seems to think that content and form are distinct, that writing and thinking are unrelated. This might be fine with him. There are others, however, for whom writing and thinking are very much conflated.

Part 3 to come next week…

Somewhere in the doctoral process graduate students learn to write like scholars.  They realize that in order to get published or to receive the accolades of their discipline they must write a certain way.  It’s as if there exists a secret scroll on which is penned the sacred law of academic writing: Write to convey only content and do not fall prey to the seduction of form.  If readers are bored, that is their fault.  If readers think they understand you they are mistaken and only have a pedestrian comprehension at best.  To be a scholar, we are taught, is to write opaquely.  Fortunately, the saving grace of scholarship is this: it is only read by other scholars, anyway.

In his book Figures of Dissent (Eagleton, 2003), Terry Eagleton criticizes two theorists on this point.  Post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, Eagleton claims, ignores her readers in the name of her own intellect: “Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonizing about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible” (159).  Who, after all, would write a sentence that reads, “many of us are trying to carve out positive negotiations with the epistemic graphing of imperialism” (ibid)?  Spivak’s most fanatic reader is likely Spivak herself.  Eagleton’s criticism also extends to Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom.  “It would be charitable”, writes Eagleton, “to think that Bloom writes as slackly and cackhandedly as he does because he is out to attract the general reader. He is admirably intent of rescuing literature from the arcane rituals of US academia and restoring it to a wider audience.  Even so, you cannot help suspecting that this rambling, platitudinous stuff is the best he can now muster” (169).   In both cases, the scholars’ pens drip pretentiousness.  It’s no wonder graduate students end up writing like windbags, Eagleton might say.  Windbags are all they know.

Eagleton is not alone.  In a review of a now popular work in critical geography (Soja, 1996), Andy Merrifield criticizes the book’s ideas and the stylelessness of the author, Edward Soja.  After trashing several core ideas from the book, Merrifield adds that “maybe the real problem here is Soja’s prose.  It is far too remote and wordy, and often screams out for clear-spoken directness.  His verbosity militates against him really getting down deep, really immersing himself in the convulsions of daily life and in the cracks and marginal twilight zone of urban life. This is where his Thirdspace [theory] resides and it is plainly where he wants to be, but he cannot quite stoop that low” (347).  Ideas are only part of scholarship; the way in which ideas are presented is equally vital.  What do we call that “way in which ideas are presented”?  Some might call it form, others style or representation.  Since content and form are a well-known twosome, we’ll keep them together.

To be continued next week…

I recently attended the National Council of Teachers of English annual conference.  This year it was in San Antonio, Texas.  The theme for the conference was “Shift Happens,” shift referring to the move from old literacies to new ones, from print media to digital.  Over the period of a few days, it became clearer to me than ever why new literacies mark the beginning of the end of English.

There are two observations I made during my time at the conference that have subtle significance to the state of English.  First, though both sessions I presented at had in their titles some reference to online literacies (MySpace in one; online in the other), we as presenters were not guaranteed either a data projector (so that the computer screen could be viewed from afar) orinternet access.  During my second presentation, I was told that internet was provided for only two rooms and that was all.  This was a conference with over twenty thousand teachers on teaching. Secondly, as I wandered up and down the aisles of the convention center where sponsors and vendors had set up booths, I was struck by how few of them had anything seriously to do with moving English beyond print media.  I strolled past bevies of book publishers, test preppromisers , and the occasional grammarian.  In short, the conference on shift happening made clear to me why shift is not in fact happening.  It’s because the people who need to take it seriously aren’t; their time, money, and effort is still stuck in the Print Age.

There are voices in English education and adjacent fields who are writing passionately and thoughtfully about our current state.  But from the looks of this convention,their voices are going unheard.  While recently reading a collection of essays called, Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, I was struck by voices likeKylene Beers, Donna Alvermann, and Sara Kajder .  Each offered an awareness of our current tension.  Beers draws attention to a sad irony–as students’ deftness in new literacies is broadening, policy makers are shrinking the definition of literacy itself so that it is more “accurately” assessable. Alvermann builds on this point, emphasizing that in addition to the narrowing of our definition of literacy, current teachers have trouble relating to themultiliteracies of their students; it’s no longer about language alone.  Finally, even Kajder’s efforts to concretize the use of technology in the classroom, while helpful for teachers to whom it is new, falls short of suggesting ways to infuse curricula with new literacy awareness and practice.  But, if infrastructural support is not in place, then very little of the above theorizing and research matters.

I’m finding a similar incongruity in my role as the technology and media coordinator at my Manhattan middle and high school.  Our administration would like to help bring the school culture and pedagogy into the digital age: conversations about SMART boards and data projectors and class web sites.  Step one, however, is far less romantic.  First we have to have computers in each classroom that are only for teacher use.  Without an infrastructure in place that can support hefty software and access web sites at high speeds, the rest is little more than a mirage.  And even though my administrative colleagues are on board with this, we now face the gauntlet of actually getting equipment and other orders in from the Board of Education.  It’s boring, dirty, and essential work.  My school, I’m happy to say, is putting its money and time behind the unglamourous task ahead.

New literacies do indeed mark the end of English.  English, as my experience at the NCTE conference supports, is dedicated to the Print Age–books, pages, pencils, paper.  Students know that there is something newer, more powerful, and interesting out there.  Teachers, unless they receive authentic institutional, infrastructural, and professional support, will do as they have done.  Shift will not happen.  In fact, shift does not need to happen.  We need infusion. It is a concerted effort to infuse pedagogy with new literacies that is needed. It can begin with suiting classrooms seriously with access to those new literacies: optimized computers, dependable Internet, and on-site digital literacy coaching.

The end of English teachers is near, I’m afraid.  While it has been a couple centuries, the time has come to acknowledge the need to move on.  English teachers haven’t been defeated, perse .  They have been subsumed by media well beyond the purview of the English language, literature, reading, and writing.  Our task now is to transition out of teaching English as traditionally understood and begin to think and teach in terms of these new media.  The transition comes with challenges.

Traditional teaching of English is inextricably linked to devilish content certainty.  Just consider this exchange from a highly regarded (and used) 19th century textbook, Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres:

Q. On what is Metaphor founded?
A. On the resemblance which one object bears to another.  It is a comparison in an abridged form. “A Minister upholds the state, like a pillar;” is a comparison. “A Minister is the Pillar of the state;” is a metaphor.
Q. Does this figure come near to Painting?
A. Yes. Its peculiar effects is to make intellectual ideas visible to the eye, by giving them colour, substance, and sensible qualities.
Q. What is the first rule to be observed in the conduct of Metaphors?
A. They should be suited to the nature of the subject of which we treat; neither too many, nor too gay, nor too elevated for it. *

The Reverend John Marsh, who adapted the book in 1822 from a longer edition, has several other similar rules for how one should use metaphor.  He notes in a footnote, quite seriously it seems, that this first rule, “*… should be particularly attended to by young writers, who are apt to be carried away by an admiration of what is showy and florid, whether in its place or not.  A great secret in composition is to know when to be simple.”  O, how we long for the days of such content clarity and unabashed authoritative teaching!

Those days are long, long gone.  The days ahead are much closer to what Marsh’s contemporary Herman Melville tried to accomplish in Moby Dick: a genre-bending tale with irresponsible and spotty narration that seeks to flip tradition on its ear.  In these new times, content is both everything and nothing; the notion of disciplines in academia crumbles as governments build emergency scaffolding around it in the form of quantitative tests.  Disciplines–and, for our purposes, English–would be best to follow the path of the Pequod: after some lofty meandering, have the decency to sink.

There is no more content, not as we have known it.  Whereas in the past, Rev. Marsh might have rattled off the content of English with certainty, I imagine our current experiences with online literacies, video/audio production, remixes, emails, and other digital tools would have left him wordless. Here’s the twist: English has always been a technology and media studies course; only, it focused on one medium–the written word.

Above, I said that English is subsumed by tech and media studies, but in actuality, it always has been just a single specialized branch of such studies.  It was the technological innovation of the stylus, according to Walter Ong, that changed the way peoples communicated.  For Ong, writing is a technology.  The next major innovation might be the printing press, which standardized printed word and enabled individuals to mass produce it quickly.  These two technological tools privileged written media.  Of course media studies was synonymous with English class.  Literature and other written and performed derivations were all we had.  However, in the 20th century, as film, television, and the internet began challenging and co-opting written media, English teachers began to splinter.  Today, it is still writing and reading the dominates our work.

Let’s let English go.  Let’s let other media have their time as well.  We must share curricula between literature, film, music, and online texts.  Perhaps, in later studies, curricula can make room for specialized courses like 19th Century American Literature, or Youtube Film Studies.  Let’s be suspicious of other disciplines that seem steady and stately.  Let’s re-read our own narrative with Ishmael, rather than Starbuck, in mind.

The professoriate is losing its radicals, the New York Times reported recently, and new professors are more moderate than their predecessors. The article suggests that the professors who flooded universities in the 60s and 70s were cut from a different cloth. Today’s academics are less politically motivated, more moderate, and research-minded rather than ideological. Teaching, however, has never been apolitical. Just ask Socrates.

Before the great Greek philosopher gulped down his fatal dosage of hemlock, he stood trial for corrupting the minds of the young. Having traipsed around Athens asking people difficult questions, never arriving at a certainty and always pushing deeper questioning above all else, Socrates was thought to be challenging democracy in politically turbulent times. The judicial remedy, of course: to kill him.

I use Socrates as an example because, in his story, it is moot to argue whether or not he explicitly criticized democracy. That is to say, it wasn’t what he said, but rather, his trial seems to have been about his teaching method—persistent questioning of one’s ideas. Whereas I’d like to say that pedagogy and politics be left to their respective corners, Socrates’ story suggests the two occupy a round room. In terms of Socrates’ trial and sentence, there seems little difference between pedagogy and politics.

It seems to me that healthy thinking necessarily critiques any subject matter. To think is to, as objectively as possible, learn certain content matter and then develop questions out of it. But, I might ask, what is one to do with the questions and conclusions one arrives at? If, as a professor, I study the way students have been taught to read over the course of western education, and I arrive at the conclusion that reading has been taught at the expense of oral expression, what do I do with that conclusion? Do I begin each course with pontification: “Reading, as it always has in our country, oppresses oral communication!”? Do I write on the top of my syllabus, “Reading kills the mind”? Do I campaign on campus for legislation that privileges oral communication over reading?

Hardly. As a professor, my role would be to share with my students the various arguments taking place around a specific topic or question and then to share my own perspective. My students, I hope, would then arrive at their own conclusions. In short, I argue for this: Dialectic over rhetoric. If professors present the latter while calling it the former, they perpetuate the type of sophistry that Socrates warned of, the result of which is intellectual manipulation.

This particular Times article presents the retiring professor as politically mindful and active. Professor Olneck, of the University of Wisconsin, for example, begins his syllabus for a course called Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality in American Education thus: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.” Those seem to be the words of a sophist, for they presuppose the outcome of inquiry thereby preventing students from genuinely (and safely) arriving at their own conclusions. Where is the room for true dialectic when the course begins at its own end. How will students respond to the statement, “They have not kept that promise”? Is there room for disagreement here? And if there is, how is a student going to know that?

The article later discusses the work of Gerald Graff, current MLA president and professor at University of Illinois – Chicago, who, when writing about the culture wars taking place in American universities posits the notion of “teaching the conflicts.” For Graff, the role of the professor is to present to students the various conflicts in a given field and let them decide for themselves. In later works, Clueless in Academe most notably, Graff goes on to say that professors need to model thinking for their students, especially in the form of verbal and written argument-making. Academic culture is, for Graff, one of argument. This take on academia seems to differ slightly from the recent lectures and writings of Graff’s contemporary, Stanley Fish. Fish, as I’ve noted previously, thinks that professors need to keep their political views out of the classrooms. Graff would hardly take issue with that. Fish goes on, however, as he did at a lecture a few months ago at Teachers College, to argue that the professor is the content expert in the classroom whose job is to transmit knowledge. I suggest that as long as a professor or classroom goes in with the attitude that he is the expert, his students are likely to genuflect at the altar of his expertise. A fair and genuine argument seems highly unlikely.

The Times presents the notion of a “sensibility gap” between the older generation of professors and the new. A fledgling professor, Sara Goldrick-Rab, describes how “’Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,’ she said. They want to question values and norms; ‘we are more driven by data.’” It is the ideological older generation who demands that newer scholars “question values and norms,” whereas the younger generation seeks objective data. I caution others not to be duped by the suggestion that data necessitates objectivity. As the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard discussed in his Postmodern Condition, knowledge creation can be created by anyone willing to pay for it. And perhaps this is an understated and paramount point: funding.

We can talk all we want about political-activism verses data-driven research. If neither side at least acknowledges that paychecks play a part in the debate, then it’s an empty argument. I don’t think the paycheck point stunts the dialogue, but it must be at least acknowledged. This is where Socrates again serves as a model: in Apology, Socrates is described as not accepting payment for his work. Perhaps only the pauper can claim to be a pedagogue. The rest, whether they call themselves social activists or data-driven researchers, are the descendants of sophists.

In yesterday’s paper, the New York Times heralded the Department of Education’s efforts to break up the large public high schools into smaller learning communities.  Speaking of one particular high school in Brooklyn, the Times wrote: “Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made new small high schools like Law and Justice a centerpiece of his effort to overhaul the system, saying students who get more personal attention will have more success in the classroom.”  Yes, students who have more personal attention from adults seem more likely to achieve their goals.  I get that.  But what interests me more is how this notion became newsworthy; how we got to this point in education.

A few months ago, Stanley Fish came to speak to students at Teachers College, Columbia University. I was in attendance. His talk consisted of his reading from a manuscript that was to be published this year and taking questions from the audience occasionally. The thrust of his argument has been repeated many times before and since in his op-ed pieces and blogs for the New York Times. It goes like this: “there are some college and university teachers who mistake the classroom lectern for a political platform and thereby substitute indoctrination for instruction. But, I argue, this need not happen — it is not an inevitable consequence either of our fallible natures or of certain subject matters — and when it does happen, it should be labeled as wrong and regarded as a reason for discipline by the school’s administration” (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/politics-and-the-classroom-one-more-try/). This argument, which Fish has resurrected in the wake of the University of Colorado’s raising of funds to appoint a Chair in Conservative Thought and Politics, states that the classroom is not a political forum; it is a place of knowledge acquisition, of objective discourse. On that evening, something bothered me about Fish’s argument. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, and it was only after a few glasses of wine with my wife and our friend that it occurred to me. It seems to me that Fish’s position falls apart when applied to public school classrooms. His audience that night was made up of mostly secondary school teachers (current or pre-service) and the difference between the private college setting and the public classroom went unsaid.

So, I’ll say it now.

Fish’s primary concern is that there are a breed of professors who pass off their political views for course content, or, who prey upon their students’ captive attention. The classroom is not place for politics. The professor’s job is to convey his expertise to the students, who are to study it, grapple with it, and produce some original response to it. It is apolitical. Now, this group that he was talking to, remember, were soon-to-be public school teachers, many of whom express a desire to change students’ lives or even society through their teaching. For many, and one such friend sat beside me on the edge of his seat with near anger at what Fish was saying, teaching is necessarily political–the books you choose to use in your classroom and the way you read them, how you assess students’ learning, and even how the students address you. All is political. And the self-aware teacher uses the politics of the classroom for good instead of evil.

The college student is not the public school student. The public school teacher is necessarily political, that is to say, the public school teacher works for the city or state and, as such, has certain responsibilities that extend well beyond content expertise. From taking attendance (for which a teacher can be held legally accountable) to reporting certain observations to guidance counselors or the police are just a couple examples. Let’s look at the latter more closely. Imagine Professor Fish giving a lecture on Book II of Paradise Lost, in which the various fallen angels debate how to retaliate against God for ousting them from heaven. A student walks in late and sits in the first row. As she sets up her place for note-taking, Professor Fish notices that she has a black eye. In such a scenario, the professor may continue his lecture, which, again, is his job: to convey knowledge. He might ask her to stay after class and ask her about it. But it’s not his job.

=”MsoNormal”>A public school teacher must report it. Legally. This is a crucial point of difference between Fish’s no-politics-in-the-classroom argument and teaching in a public school. My students aren’t yet adults.

That having been said, I’m not in favor of rampant political manipulation (or intellectual manipulation for that matter) in the classroom either. Teachers have tremendous influence on their students. The wearing of political pins, sharing of personal anecdotes, and even likes and dislikes must be considered professionally. Recently, I sought to teach students about allusions in Milton’s writings. In order to explore the concept before applying to the literature, I played an excerpt from Jay-Z’s song “A Dream” in which he samples his predecessor Notorious BIG’s voice, and repeats lines or snippets from BIG’s song “Juicy.” My point was that when one artist alludes to another artist or text, the allusion carries with it history and even culture. You get two texts for one, and you get it simultaneously.

The next day, one student showed me that he had bought “A Dream” and had it on his iPod.

Is this political? Not necessarily. But does it point to the subtlety of influence that teachers have on their students? Yes, it does. Influence, however, does not mean politics. Granted, Fish has certain blatant scenarios in mind—University of Colorado, currently. But short of professors or teachers using explicit political language in their classrooms, aren’t we talking about basic professional responsibility? Pedagogues should model thoughtfulness for their students. Fair enough. Perhaps if politicians had better models of thoughtfulness our students—in New York City, for example—would have the attention, resources, and physical space to learn. Perhaps Professor Fish could advise those politicians. In an op-ed, of course, not his classroom.

On the campus of Columbia University is Butler Library.  Its neo-classical design, with fourteen imposing columns supporting the names of famous ancients, immediately draws the eye of any passerby. The names etched into stone above these columns are of great classical writers: Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Vergil.  Interestingly, one of these names is not like the others: Homer.  Homer’s name appears carved into the building because its designers thought him to be a great ancient writer.  Homer, most historians now agree, was no writer.  He was a singer–an oral poet–and probably the amalgamation of many bards over many years.  I use Homer as an example because his eternal presence on the facade of the library bespeaks a point of tension in the histories of education and literature, not to mention the current culture of the prior.  Why has speech–orality–become so marginalized in education?  What has happened to the heard spaces of the ancients?  Have they disappeared, or perhaps subverted the dominant written culture in which we educators now find ourselves?