How to Fix English?

A new version.

A good friend and former fellow English teacher sent me this New York Times op-ed, which references this long essay in the New Yorker my older brother had forwarded on to me just a few days earlier. The New York Time’s op-ed considers the methodology of teaching English in high schools as possibly contributing to the precipitous decline of English majors at the university level addressed in The New Yorker. I found both pieces equally alarming.

In my 3+ decades of teaching, 2/3 of that time to college/university students, the last decade to mostly high school students, I concur with both authors; we face a range of crisis in English and the humanities at both the high school and higher education levels. I was also reminded of and revisited an old essay by the famed writer and medical doctor, Lewis Thomas, “How to Fix the Premedical Curriculum,” written in the late 70s—the glory days of the humanities—in which he was alarmed way back then that future doctors were given so little training in literature, philosophy (ethics), history, art, given that they are tasked with mending us and often faced with complex ethical decisions.

The NYT piece makes an argument I wholly agree with; we need to find ways to let students enjoy reading, to meander through the dream worlds created by authors and not quiz them to death about tone, vocabulary, figures of speech…. But I also fear that high school and college students are simply becoming less and less able to dive into books like The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, Beloved…. When teaching these books in high school, I often felt as if I were trying to teach Shakespeare to an ape. Hawthorne demands a willingness and ability to fight through his many archaic, 19th century words (contumely, ignominy, antinomian, eldritch…), or even just all of the English words unfamiliar to today’s students that refer to one’s face or appearance (visage, physiognomy, mien, countenance, aspect, semblance, veneer, facade, air…). Today’s English students may well simply have lost the ability to process complex literary writing—so they turn to Spark Notes and summaries, or now ChatGpt to get them through. 

While the cause is certainly multi-faceted, I do fear that the smart phones in students’ pockets—each of which contains more computer firing power than the machines that helped us land on the moon—play a nefarious role in all of this. A student, hormones raging, may well pause for a moment on a sexually alluring image, and the algorithms at play start to whir and hum, and so 86.42% of the next batch of images they swipe to are still more sexually alluring. They lean forward and swipe to the next one, then the next (in between swipes being hit with short advertisement blasts for things the algorithm thinks they may want)…all while a dozen friends have sent them text messages or forwarded on funny TikTok’s—their copy of The Scarlet Letter remaining on the nightstand…. If I were a student today, I’m certain I, too, would be utterly swept up in the never-ending, siren-call of social media and the Internet. 

There is no easy solution to any of this, and I fear that the birth of AI will only make things still more difficult for English studies and the humanities. One possible tool to combat this might be simply to work to get students to set their phones aside and read more, read just about anything, but read a lot more of it, and read with very little to no requirement to summarize or analyze or interpret. I wholeheartedly support the French school system’s decision a few years back to ban cell phones from the classroom, and I think that act alone could be transformative in how students learn (and interact socially). I fear that most students need to be retrained at a fundamental level. 

Years ago I came up with the following thought experiment:  take two groups of the same mix of students—basic educational ability, background, race, gender, etc. Have one group take a standard high school English class, where they will read 4-5 books, have vocab quizzes and reading comprehension quizzes and book checks for annotations and be guided through writing 4-5 longer essays, etc. Have the other group simply read 20-30 books of their choosing from a broad list of contemporary and modern texts. English class becomes “reading time,” teachers fostering discussions of books, answering questions, suggesting other things to read…. Nothing else. No reading logs, no journaling. Certainly no tests or quizzes or grades. At the end give both groups a similar task, something like: “write an essay about the most memorable things you read this year, and use details from the texts to support your thinking.” My prediction is the group who simply read the big stack of books would write more engaging essays, their vocabulary would be broader, their thinking more nuanced, their ability to synthesize themes more advanced. And they would be more ready for the rigors of college humanities classes, less afraid of reading, more excited to learn a whole litany of words and ideas when they got to college. Who knows, they might even decide to major in English.