There is an idea running through some forms of Internet Discourse, known as Elite Overproduction. Which is to say, the high emphasis on College and University education has produced more people trained to do Academic Thinking then there are actual jobs requiring such. In the old days, of course, a college degree in English was a social mark indicating a certain Status, entailing social connection to the Right Sorts of People. It was Finishing School, and academic performance was more or less besides the point.

Since World War II and the expansion of Higher Education (funded at first by GI Bills and now by an ocean of debt), this ideal has slowly vanished, and a Bachelor’s Degree in any subject is now the educational equivalent of what a High School Diploma was a generation or two earlier, and we confront the absurdity of people who have gone into life-crippling debt and ended up in menial service jobs, or low-paying internships, doing work a few days of cursory training could have prepared them for. Higher Education has become a Hustle.

It has also become a Cult, creating missionaries of a particular form of “Justice”, the precepts of which cannot be questioned. This has gone under many names “Social Justice”, or “Deconstruction”, and several others. I’m not going to bother with that, as debating religious precepts is a non-starter. You either Believe or you don’t.

I’m more interested in discussing this as it applies to teaching English in secondary education. Observe as Larry Correia butts up against an intolerant Witch-Hunter:

After I was approached by these parents, I asked my son about this class. To give you an idea how bad it is, (my son) told me that “it sucks”, he had learned absolutely nothing, but he was getting an A because he’s good at “telling the teacher whatever she wants to hear.” My son wasn’t learning any English skills at all, but rather how to play a political game.

I was appalled to hear that they would be spending the entire trimester on a single book, The Great Gatsby. Three months? I have nothing against The Great Gatsby, but to put this in perspective, it is only 47,000 words. My copy is 210 pages. The audio book is only 4 hours long. By novel standards it is extremely short. My smallest novel is more than double that, and my average is triple. Basically I’ve written longer books in less time than this class is being forced to analyze what’s basically a turgid novella.

It doesn’t matter how good a book is though, because tortuously analyzing any book for three months would make it awful.

“Who Needs High School English When You Can Have Social Justice Instead?” -Larry Correia, Monsterhunternation.com

As I said, I’m not interested in the politics. Parents nationwide are tired of being treated like Kulaks because they dare to question the Education Commissars. It has effected elections nationwide. I’d like to look at it in terms of How We Read.

I’ve read The Great Gatsby, and I like it. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose hits the happy medium of Lost Generation writers, the Just Right between Hemingwayan terseness and Faulknerian flow, and Gatsby is, as Correia writes, a short book. I read it, either in high school or college, not because I had to, but because I’d heard of it and was curious. I’ve reread it several times.

Would I hate it if I’d had to read it in High School? Maybe. I remember only a couple novels from high school: All Quiet on the Western Front, which had a profound effect on me, and Things Fall Apart, which I’ve blogged about before. Some of the books I was assigned in High School, especially Summer Reading, I straight up skipped (I read maybe a couple chapters of A Tale of Two Cities, and none of The Once and Future King, and somehow I managed to pass the tests pertaining to them anyway. I’m stupid good at taking tests).

The point is, we didn’t spend three months on any of our English class works. The purpose was to read, comprehend, and think some about what the author was trying to say and how the author chose to say it. We weren’t applying “critical lenses” in high school.

None of these “lense” help the kids get better at writing or communicating. They are designed to squash dissent and force rigid conformity through public shaming.

What do I mean by that? It isn’t my story to tell, but one of the moms at the last parent’s meeting talked about how her daughter comes home in furious tears because she fails to live up to this teacher’s imposed ideal of feminism.

These “literary approaches” do not promote greater understanding of books. On the contrary they try to shoehorn in a bunch of political nonsense which isn’t in the actual work, and they fabricate messages the authors never intended. The kids aren’t learning to write. They are learning to “deconstruct” writing, which is totally backwards.

–ibid.

I did have to take a critical theory course in college, my senior year. I found it an entirely pleasant and stimulating exercise. The professor was a learned and kindhearted woman who spoke to us like we were adults, she did not browbeat or shame us, and she accepted intellectual challenges in the classroom with aplomb (she once said, “According to Post-Modernism there are no objective [i.e. universal] statements,” to which I replied “Is that an objective statement?” She liked me after that).

For the final assignment of the class, we had to pick a piece of text, any text, and apply three critical lenses (she called them “theories”) to it, and then pick one of those lenses as the least applicable, and state why. After she graded our efforts, we could meet with her and discuss, one on one, our efforts. I got an A for my essay, on Richard III, but I chatted with her anyway, because we enjoyed each other’s intellectual company.

My point is, teaching critical reading doesn’t have to be miserable, and it doesn’t have to be like learning a catechism. In fact, any teacher who is teaching critical reading without a sense of joy and fun, is Doing It Wrong. Any teacher who stomps out a student’s questions or challenges, who grades based on conformity to doctrine, is nothing but a prison warden.

I have my doubts about whether critical reading is appropriate to high school, because I don’t think you can do it well unless you’re very widely read, and enjoy reading for its own sake. Very few high school students, even at the Honors Level, are up to that challenge. Shoving it down their throats at this juncture is thus entirely counterproductive: it turns literature into drudgery and deep thought into a performative chore. As Correia says, it does not create readers; it does not create writers.

You cannot create an informed and intelligent citizenry by demanding that they jump through hoops. They will resent it, they will half-ass it, and they will dispense with your efforts the minute they are free to. If you treat your students (and their parents) like benighted savages unwittingly desperate for your enlightenment, you are the problem, and you missed the entire point of what Chinua Achebe was talking about.

A proper English class should be animated by the love of reading, the love of discussing reading, the love of honest discussions of reading. The kid who found the book “boring” gets to say that, because sometimes a book doesn’t do anything for you. In 9th grade English class, I wrote a review of one of the sequels to Clan of the Cave Bear (the assignment was to review any book we’d read. Why I’d read that, I have no idea). I hated it, attacked it savagely, and my English teacher wrote in the margins that he would studiously avoid it. That’s the spirit, one of responding to students as pilgrims on a journey of their own taking.

You can be a guide to students, but you are not their master. Your job is not to shove doctrine, but to enable appreciation. Every human has the right to decide for themselves what they accept as true. Respect that, or you will fail, and you will spend your life hating people for not being as SMRT as you, and you will deserve the misery that flows therefrom.

And by the way, a good writing class teaches you far more about literature than any amount of critical theory. As Flaubert had it, a man becomes a critic because he cannot be a writer, as a man becomes a spy when he cannot be a soldier.