[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday waffle...

On 2005/05/31, at 22:01, Steven G. Cameron wrote:

> Ursula Stange wrote:
>
>
>> Sadly, we can no longer take for granted that our students understand
>> the many cultural references (most obviously the Bible and  
>> Shakespeare)
>> that generations of past students were expected to have at their
>> fingertips.  I had a student once who wrote, in a final exam, a  
>> sentence
>> about Noa Zark.  (I shudder to think how this story reflects on my
>> teaching, of course.)   Perhaps they learn too much of their language
>> through their ears, and too little through their eyes.   More  
>> proof: the
>> legions who don't differentiate between 'past' and 'passed.'
>>
>
> **An ongoing dinner-topic conversation in our house. Our eldest, now
> completing his junior year in high school, has not studied Shakespeare
> in either of the past two years -- in honors English. In truth, it's
> difficult to ascertain the curriculum objectives from eclectic,
> unfocused reading selections chosen for his English course this  
> year...


Having lived through this transition and, thus, of course, having  
only a frog in a well's perspective on what was really going on, I  
offer the following observations.

When I was in high school (York High School, Yorktown, Virginia,  
1958-62), the "standard academic track" required for admission to  
college included four years of English, four years of math, four  
years of science, four years of social studies including, in  
Virginia, junior and senior courses entitled Virginia and American  
History and Virginia and American Government, respectively, three  
years of one or two years of two foreign languages. When I started  
high school, the English component included Shakespeare in every  
year. The four years of math were Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry,  
and Advanced Algebra and Trigonometry; the post-Sputnik reforms that  
would bring calculus into the high school curriculum just missed me.  
Science would have been General Science, Biology, Chemistry and  
Physics. Thanks to the same reforms, whose intent was to push  
Biology, Chemistry and Physics down one grade, making room for a  
second year of AP science (the advanced placement version of Biology,  
Chemistry or Physics), I wound up skipping biology and graduated with  
a year of Physics and two years of Chemistry. On the language front I  
did two years of Latin and two years of German. Having also grown up  
in a pious Lutheran family, I had survived numerous years of Bible  
study and, at ages 11-13, catechism classes.

By the time I wended my way through college and graduate school and  
wound up teaching briefly (1972-1976) at Middlebury College in  
Vermont, the collapse of this "standard academic track" curriculum  
was well-advanced. I recall a colleague who taught Chinese history  
and had, for years, drawn parallels between the role of Nagarjuna in  
the spread of Buddhism in China and that of St. Augustine in the  
spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. He then had realized one  
day that virtually none of his students knew anything about St.  
Augustine or the Roman Empire. I myself was startled one day while  
discussing theories of knowledge with a very bright student  
(graduated Phi Beta Kappa, he did).  I suggested that knowledge might  
be conceived as an asymptote, approaching but never reaching a limit  
called Truth. It was then I discovered that his contact with  
mathematics had ended with Algebra I.  He was clueless when it came  
to the notion of limits on which the calculus is constructed. It took  
me a while but I finally did learn that I simply could not and should  
not make any assumptions about the knowledge that students brought to  
the classroom. They might be sophisticated in ways that, as a high  
school student, I had never dreamed of but, at the same time,   
ignorant of much of what I took for granted. Even so good a college  
as Middlebury was no longer in the business of expanding and  
deepening a common culture but, instead, being transformed into an  
intellectual supermarket where the students picked out what appealed  
to them and could graduate utterly clueless when it came to such  
topics as the history of Western (or any other) civilization or, for  
that matter, US history.

Cheers,

John McCreery
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