Posted in Book Reviews

In a review of Gerald Graff's book , Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, Sandra Stotsky culls some pertinent passages that give us "clues" on why our universities may be failing our children:

"The attrition rate among those who are admitted to four-year colleges in 
this country is high. More than half drop out before graduation. Many of 
those who go on to graduate do just enough to get through. And many, if not 
most, students do not feel they were well prepared in high school for 
college work. Their English courses are particularly troublesome because 
they do not know how the literary texts they are assigned to read matter in 
general, or how these texts might matter to them personally if they could in 
fact read them. They do not enjoy literary analysis and find the search for 
“hidden meanings” mystifying. They do not know how to write formal English. 
Nor do they tend to understand what their humanities professors are talking 
about when they engage in the kind of theorizing that constitutes academic 
discourse in the humanities today. These are among the chief problems faced 
by those who teach literature at the college level..."
 
"How could students today come to college English classes prepared to argue 
about the interpretation of a text when, as I found in a review of K–12 
English standards in 50 states, most states' literature standards betray the 
heavy hand of two major academic theories on reading and teaching 
literature: reader response and the new historicism (Stotsky 2005). The 
first compels equal respect for each student's subjective interpretation of 
a text, while the second is obsessed with the context and author of a text, 
not the text itself. The influence of reader response theory alone on at 
least two generations of elementary and secondary English teachers has been 
an unmitigated disaster, and its bitter fruits must be apparent in every 
college English class.
 
An English professor cannot expect students to argue about any one 
interpretation of a text when they have been taught for 12 years by teachers 
dutifully following a state dictate that says they are to “respond to 
literary works on the basis of personal insights and respect the different 
responses of others” ( Montana ) or “understand that a single text will 
elicit a wide variety of responses, each of which is valid from a personal, 
subjective perspective” ( Delaware ).
 
Nor can college students easily engage in an argument with a critic about a 
literary work they are studying when they have not learned that they must 
first read and try to understand what the author wrote.
 
.... It is almost impossible to undo in a few undergraduate English courses 
all those years of mistraining in literary study in K–12 with the solution 
he offers."