Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce
Special orders, don't upset us
All we ask is that you let us
Serve it your way
The New York Times’ Stanley Fish is at it again. (See What Should Colleges Teach?) Peevitudinal hectoring. You know.
He's worried about writing ability. Even grad students, he carps, can’t write “a clean English sentence.” What’s up with that?
According to Fish, it seems, the problem is that composition classes teach “everything under the sun,” but they don't teach composition.
Years ago, her writes, he secured the lesson plans of 104 composition classes and he found that
instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization.
Yep, that’s what they do. Is that a bad thing? Students have to write about something, don't they?
Fish, being Fish, adopted a bold and unpopular position and then commenced bulldozing: “unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”
“Nothing else,” eh? Is that even possible? Perhaps, our readers who teach composition can weigh in.
Oddly (or no?), Fish says he now has “support” from a right-wing organization:
Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni …, [f]ounded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995….
Yep, that Lynne Cheney, the wife of you-know-who and the author of the notorious novel Sisters. (Gosh, it’s got lesbian action. OK, but surely this is surprising coming from Cheney, that right-wing culture warrior.)
He’s only “slightly” uncomfortable?
Fish does criticize the ACTA’s willingness to “monitor academic work from the outside.” The “cure for the politicization of the classroom by some professors is not the counter-politicization urged by ACTA,” he says.
Still, he finds much in ACTA’s recent report (“What Will They Learn?”) to agree with:
With respect to science, composition, foreign language instruction and mathematics, ACTA is simply saying, Don’t slight the core of the discipline.
In essence, Fish adopts the mantra: “teach the subject matter and don’t adulterate it with substitutes.”
Got that, comp instructors?
Students are offered too many choices, too many options, says Fish (and Cheney, et al.). Instead, college instruction should focus on a coherent “core curriculum.” Fish quotes Cheney and Co.:
An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.”
Yeah, that’s been E.D. Hirsch’s big point. Communitarians sometimes harp on this. Makes sense to me. Up to a point.
From there, Fish does part ways with the restrictive right-wingers:
The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun….
OK, comp instructors. What do you think? Are your comp classes a “sham”?
