Erin O'Connor of Critical Mass wants to hear your comments about reading and writing in public and private schools, as part of a response to a NYTimes article which calls for better education of teachers:
All this is of course easier said than done, and what's being easily said is also, of course, highly disputable: The editorial's apparent assumption, for example, that ed school ought still to be a gateway to public school teaching really cannot stand as an assumption at this stage of the public debate on education.
Something the article does not not mention--in fairness, because the issue is beyond its particular purview--is how independent schools are confronting the same pressing issues of declining literacy. We center our debates on literacy and education on public schools, and the working assumption there appears to be that the issue only really affects kids in public schools. While it seems clear enough that the most extreme manifestations of the problem are to be found in public schools, it's equally clear that independent schools are affected, too. It's just not that unusual for teachers in these schools to encounter serious deficits in their students, and to find themselves doing a depressing--and sometimes seemingly futile--amount of remediation. I would guess, too, that just like the public schools, these schools struggle at times to find teachers who are capable of doing that remediation.
One very basic reason for this--one of many-is that for more than a generation now, the study of grammar has been out of favor in American schools. Without solid grounding in grammar, a student is never really going to learn to write well. Even more to the point, without a solid grounding in grammar, that student's teachers are not only not going to be able to teach that student to write well, they aren't even going to know when a student cannot write.
Students who don't learn to write in school probably aren't reading as well. Lest you think that the situation is better in college, Joanne Jacobs discovers students planning to write for a living who don't bother to read:
The scene: A college classroom at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The subject: Writing the newspaper column. The question: "Can any of you name a columnist you read -- in a newspaper or magazine or online -- on a regular basis?"
In response: Dead silence.
Slowly, one hand rises. A sports columnist is mentioned. Nobody else in the room hints at any recognition of the sports columnist's name: Anyone?
"My generation is very visually oriented," explains Ryan Schreiber, a U-M Dearborn junior from Dearborn who -- like most in the class -- is majoring in journalism but doesn't read much of it. "My generation grew up watching MTV. We are used to short spurts of words, lots of images...We're used to immediate gratification."
He points out that columns like this one are blocks of text, decorated only with a thumbnail photo and a headline. No dancing images, no colorful pop-ups, no audio. Words on paper. Blah...
In another journalism class down the hall, the instructor annoyed his students. After asking how many read a newspaper regularly -- four or five out of 35 said they did -- he required them to bring a newspaper to class twice a week. "The students don't like it," says Laura Hipshire, one of the journalism students.
These are journalism students, folks. And they can't even be bothered to read newspapers. Yes, yes, I've criticized newspapers in the past, but not because I can't concentrate long enough to read one, or because I don't know that good ones do exist. Why on earth are these kids entering this field if they can't hack reading The Washington Post, never mind writing for it?
Photon Courier's explanation is as good as any.
Posted by kswygert at February 6, 2005 05:41 PM