Book Review: Why Teach? by Mark Edmundson

No one does bitterness and scorn quite as well as old white guys, and no old white guys are so well equipped to express their discontent as college professors, hurling scrolls of invective from their ivory towers.  For most of this book, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, Mark Edmundson does his pitch-perfect impression of the angry old white professor dude, but, then, the tone turns and becomes unexpectedly tender and personal.  For a short while.

Edmundson's main gripe is with what his beloved liberal arts university has become in the modern age.

In the old days, when the university was a quasi-churchly institution, the professors largely called the shots. ... But in the new university all this changed.  Now the professors were the people who gave the grades, period. ... anyone who revered them for their wisdom or wanted to emulate them was tacitly understood to be half-cracked (x).

As you'd expect, Edmundson is a university professor, and he dislikes his loss of prestige and power, to put it plainly.

Who's to blame?  The easy demon: society.

To me, liberal arts education is as ineffective as it is now ... [because] university culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images (6).

Well, then, we only need reverse the prevailing trend of American culture over the past three generations.  And a nice little book like this (ranked #396,984 in sales on Amazon) might just turn that tide (See?  I can be sarcastic, too!)

But Edmundson also blames the university itself, which in America (as we do all know) has become nothing more than a diploma mill where those who pay their tuition bills receive credentials in exchange, which they can then parley into money-making careers.  Still, he holds out hope for those little pockets of genuine education secreted throughout the country.

If you want to get a real education in America, you're going to have to fight ... against the institution that you find yourself in ... you'll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people (52).

His pastiche of the "corporate city" type of university, bent solely on commerce and credentialization (yes, not really a word, but Mark will get the joke), is worthy of Mencken:

Universities that have made themselves into corporate cities are not hard to spot.  Most of the students - and many members of the faculty - are buzzing from place to place, always feeling a bit self-important, always feeling a bit behind, like that poor rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (107).

And the values they promote stand for similar biting review:

Why is excellence a bad word?  It's not, in and of itself.  But people around universities who use it are people who want to talk about worldly distinction without talking about ethics.  Excellence means we're smart, we're accomplished, we're successful - and we can be these things without any obligation to help our fellow human beings. ... Why is leadership so bad?  In itself, it's not.  But what people usually mean by a leader now is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all of the values of the people who are in charge (109).

But no one falls in line for harsher rebuking than the students themselves, in whom ever positive qualities betray an underlying stupidity.

... the reason that the kids are so open and appealing is that they're innocents.  Their naiveté is what's beguiling.  And part of what creates that innocence is ignorance.  They don't go from place to place pressed to the ground with the burden of the past - in part because they don't know much about that past (101).

Keep in mind that we are talking about college students at a prestigious university, "kids" who aced AP history courses, and Edmundson's depiction of them as grinning buffoons is all the more damning.  These "kids" are incapable of any intellectual discourse altogether.

It's this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that students immersed in the manic culture of Internet and Adderall are conditioned not to have (45).

So culture, the moneyed university, and the ignorant, complacent, drug-addled students have turned higher education into a sham, in Edmundson's view.

Then - and I know I've made you wait a while for it - the book turns.  Edmundson recalls the high school teacher, Mr. Meyers, who woke him from his unintellectual torpor and taught him that education is an act of rebellion.

Before Meyers arrived, I never rebelled against the place, at least not openly.  I didn't in part because I believed that Medford High was the only game there was.  The factories where my father and uncles worked were extensions of the high school; the TV shows we watched were manufactured to fit the tastes for escape that such places form; the books we were assigned to read in class, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, The Good Earth, of which I ingested about fifty pages each, could, as I saw it then (I've never had the wherewithal to check back into them), have been written by the English teachers, with their bland, babbling goodness and suppressed hysterias (122).

Perhaps Edmundson's students, whose laptops are no longer welcome in his class since he discovered they were watching booty-shaking videos and emailing during class rather than taking notes, are a reflection of his younger self?  Maybe they see his book choices as he saw his teachers'?  Shockingly, this possibility does not occur to Edmundson.  But if, as he posits, education is an act of rebellion, then his students are rebelling effectively, against him and his worldview.

Verily, Edmundson seems to turn his firehose of vitriol on everyone but himself.  While on the cusp of self-discovery he backs away and returns to his comfortable weapons of sarcasm and high dudgeon, facetiously advising the imagined straw man of a new humanities professor:

... students believe it is up to the teacher to describe the book so appealingly (to advertise it, in short) that later in life, given leisure, they might have a look.  The summary and description should be carried on in a diverting way.  There ought to be copious reference to analogous themes and plots in recent popular culture.  Jokes ought to be offered at the expense of at least some of the characters, preferably all. ... In no event should the instructor hint that the author or the characters in the book are in any way superior to the students who have condescended to encounter them (145).

Indeed, Edmundson's greatest enemy appears to be the professor who does exactly thus, who tolerates a lowering of intellectual standards and embraces the familiar demon of pop culture.  He openly acknowledges his need to demonize.

Every essay on education needs a villain.  There has to be someone or something preventing the liberal arts from being the world-changing enterprise we all suspect they can be.  And I suppose so far I have supplied a few (203).

Ah, yes, Professor, you have supplied a few villains.  But I'm giving your book a C+ in that you propose no other hero than yourself, and you, Professor, cannot save education because education does not need saving.  Popular culture has always been a bane of lowbrow, mindless entertainment, but it is the intellectual's job to elevate these things by seeking to understand them rather than dismiss them, to write about baseball like Roger Angell, to write about Madonna like Camille Paglia, and to write about drug addicts like William T. Vollmann.

So I'll answer the book's question: Why teach?  We teach because we believe in deep thinking and the power of deep thinking and writing and reading to change the world in lasting, positive ways.  And we realize that we cannot do so by ourselves, and so we teach to train an army of thinkers - not to spurn and scorn them as dimwits, but to grab them by their souls and give them a good drubbing, saying, "Wake, sleeper, wake!  Wake and see what the world truly is!  See what you truly are!"

Book Review: Getting Schooled by Garret Keizer

I never could bring myself to read all the way through books by alleged super teachers like Ron Clark and Rafe Esquith.  While they offer some sound advice (and their tomes are nothing but a patchwork quilt of pithy recommendations, often enumerated and always emphatic), their primary example of how a classroom should look and operate was their own, and at times the pointless bragging about going to the White House or having the president namedrop them in a State of the Union speech grew tiresome.  To be honest, it wasn't "at times" or "grew tiresome."  It was as consistently annoying as trying to lie out in the hammock on a pleasant day only to be pestered by mosquitos (a common occurrence here in Savannah).

Imagine, then, my relief at Garret Keizer's testimony to the triumphs and trials of teaching, where right on the first page he lays naked his shortcomings and aspirations:

It's fair to say that I have never gone to work in a school with what might be called purity of heart, though much of what I know about purity of heart I learned there.

Keizer second guesses not only local and federal policies and procedures, but turns his bitter, geezerly, cynical eye mainly on his own soul.  When he does stab at policy, however, it is delightfully mordant:

... throughout the school year, I will repeatedly be struck by the sense that the professed goal of creating 'a level playing field' through education is little more than the goal of sorting winners from losers with a steady hand and a clear conscience.  The single greatest expression of the American project, American public education is also its most cynical lie. ... I'm still straining to keep my mouth shut ... 

He also does not spare his students this raking analysis and dry commentary:

I have a small, highly cooperative lunch-period study hall, and a most delightful girl on the list, someone whose studiousness and affability seem to rub off on her neighbors.  One day she has nothing to do ... I ask her if she likes art.  Yes, she likes art very much.  Music to my ears - among several of the books I've brought to school for browsing is an expensive coffee table compendium of painting and sculpture by three Italian masters ....  The girl glances at the book without opening it.  'Thanks,' she says, 'but I guess I'll just draw,' by which she means penciling in the scribbled loops on a torn-out page of lined notebook paper.  So much for the Renaissance.

The running theme, then, is hypocrisy and the disappointment it engenders.  But, again, Keizer rifles through no one's corrupt morality more than his own.  When he mentally criticizes a troubled student for her sloppy work ethic, he immediately pulls out the whip for a round of self-flagellation:

     Not that I would say such a thing, and I'm not exactly pleased with myself for thinking it.  Even in this funky little tutorial I am reminded of how hard it it to predict when and how a girl or boy is going to catch fire. ... I'm reminded as well of how hard-won an achievement a kid's mere attendance can be relative to the forces keeping her down. ... And, perhaps, who knows, my greatest contribution to her life may be the remembrance of a single late afternoon when she glimpsed what it means to be part of a community of scholars.  It will be my fondest remembrance too: I know even as I'm sitting here that the year will hold nothing better than this.

So the drive to change lives and teach, to be a teacher, to teach students, lets go the accelerator and drifts off to settling for a single moment of semi-successful after school tutoring.  Keizer's honesty allows his greatest insight, that we cannot really be those plastic Ken doll National Teachers of the Year, hailed by presidents, book publishers, and motivational speaker bureaus alike.  We try, and we fail.  We cannot change every life with which we intersect, after all, but we do well enough to try, and to have those occasional moments of epiphany when we realize that Bob Marley was right, that we don't have to worry about a thing, because every little thing is gonna be alright.  Even if it really won't.

Book Review: Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willett

" ... she was, just for an instant, ... impressed by her own arcane powers ... "

Reading Jincy Willett's wincingly comic novel, Amy Falls Down, I couldn't help but think of that Springsteen classic, "Glory Days."  The gist of the song - and this book, in a way - is how strange we are to yearn for a past which we've painted gold, rather than engage with the present day.

Aren't we all, in the flush of some youthful success, impressed, just for an instant, by our own arcane powers?

Amy, the novel's main character, enjoyed a brief and minor celebrity - extremely brief and extremely minor - as a young writer, but has since slipped into a torpor where the closest she comes to writing is slowly filling a notebook with potential short story titles from snippets of phrases she catches in her dull days.  She fears failure, and so she dare not risk trying - not beyond titles, anyway, titles which stare vacuously at us atop empty pages.

Perhaps it's just me, but I suspect it's a facet of the human condition to savor a glorious moment from our early days, once to be impressed by our own arcane powers, and thereafter to live in fear that we will never again achieve such heights, molehills though they might have been.

Amy, however, falls down.  And bumps her head.  On a birdbath.

From this accident, she rediscovers writing and is rediscovered as a writer - she is born again, albeit accidentally.  She finds her voice, sings again, taking those infertile lists of story titles and opening them like umbrellas full of rain, pouring out words and ideas.

Can success then be a simple accident, a mishap, a misunderstanding?  We'd like to claim our brilliance and industriousness brought us to greatness (such as our greatness is), but secretly we know that we benefited from forces outside our control and design.  Maybe we should ban the concept of greatness from our vocabularies and philosophies, and just allow people to do what they do without being measured against some ridiculous list of eminent ones: Einstein, Picasso, et al.

What damage do we inflict upon our children by telling them "You can be the greatest, you can be the best," when we know that 99.99% of them will hover in the range of average accomplishments.

I read the obituaries every day, and even the most accomplished of our locally deceased will vanish to living memory once everyone who knew them passes on.  Yet we yearn for greatness as the path to immortality.  How silly.

No wonder this is a comic novel, for this is a comedic life.