Heather Mac Donald:

American employers regard the nation’s educational system as an irrelevance, according to a Census Bureau survey released in February of this year. Businesses ignore a prospective employee’s educational credentials in favor of his work history and attitude. Although the census researchers did not venture any hypothesis for this strange behavior, anyone familiar with the current state of academia could have provided explanations aplenty.

One overlooked corner of the academic madhouse bears in particular on graduates’ job-readiness: the teaching of writing. In the field of writing, today’s education is not just an irrelevance, it is positively detrimental to a student’s development. For years, composition teachers have absorbed the worst strains in both popular and academic culture. The result is an indigestible stew of 1960s liberationist zeal, 1970s deconstructionist nihilism, and 1980s multicultural proselytizing. The only thing that composition teachers are not talking about these days is how to teach students to compose clear, logical prose.

Predictably, the corruption of writing pedagogy began in the sixties. In 1966, the Carnegie Endowment funded a conference of American and British writing teachers at Dartmouth College. The event was organized by the Modern Language Association and the National Conference of Teachers of English. The Dartmouth Conference was the Woodstock of the composition professions: It liberated teachers from the dull routine of teaching grammar and logic.

The Dartmouth Conference rejected what was called a “transmission model” of English in favor of a “growth model.” In a transmission mode, teachers pass along composition skills and literary knowledge. In a growth mode, according to Joseph Harris, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, they focus on students’ “experience of language in all forms”—including ungrammatical ones. A big problem with the transmission model of English, apparently, is that it implies that teachers actually know more than their students do. In the growth model, in contrast, the teacher is not an authority figure; rather, he is a supportive, nurturing friend, who works with, rather than challenges, what a student has to say. Dartmouth proponents claimed that improvement in students’ linguistic skills need not come through direct training in grammar and style but, rather, would flower incidentally as students experiment with personal and expressive forms of talk and writing.

The Dartmouth Conference and subsequent writing pedagogy reflected the political culture of the time. It was anti-authoritarian and liberationist; it celebrated inarticulateness and error as proof of authenticity. But it was also a response to the looming problem of race. City University of New York (CUNY) began the nation’s first academic affirmative-action program in 1966; other schools would soon follow suit. The movement to legitimate black English began at that time. Confronted with a barrage of students who had no experience in formal grammar or written language, it was highly convenient for professors to learn that students’ natural way of speaking and writing should be preserved, not corrected.

There is a final ideological strand in composition pedagogy that has its roots in the late 1960s: Marxism. Teachers on the radical left began arguing that the demand for literacy oppresses the masses. Writing in Radical Teacher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology humanities professor Wayne O’Neill explains that “it has become important for the ruling class to exclude the potentially radicalizing elements of higher education from the colleges. Thus everywhere along the scale of education there is a relentless march toward the basics.” James Sledd, professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas at Austin, writes in College English that standard English is “essentially an instrument of domination,” and that coercing students to speak properly conditions them to accept the coercion of capitalism. Richard Ohmann, humanities professor at Wesleyan, has pronounced the “decline of literacy…a fiction, if not a hoax.”

The political process

The Dartmouth Conference gave rise to what became known as the process school of composition. Peter Elbow of Evergreen State College is its most influential practitioner. Not all of Elbow’s ideas are bad. He emphasizes that writing is a continuous process, composed mostly of rewriting. He encourages students to think of their essays in terms of multiple drafts, rather than single-shot efforts. He had vigorously promoted “free writing,” a warm-up exercise in which the author writes continuously for a fixed period of time, uninhibited by grammar, punctuation, or logic.

But the drawbacks of the process school cancel its contributions. Elevating process has driven out standards. Rather than judging a piece of student writing by an objective measure of coherence and correctness, teachers are supposed to evaluate how much the student has grown over the course of a semester. The hottest trend in grading—portfolio assessment—grows out of the process school. Elbow created the method after he saw the “harmful effects of writing proficiency exams.”

Among the most harmful of those effects is apparently the assault on self-esteem that results from a poor grade. In portfolio assessment, students’ evaluations are based on drafts of papers, diary entries, letters, and other informal assignments compiled over the course of a semester, rather than on the freestanding merit of a paper or exam. Often the student “collaborates” with the teacher in assigning a grade to the portfolio. Portfolio assessment allows for the radical reduction of standards, imports greater subjectivity into grading, and is extremely time-consuming.

For the process school, politics undermines pedagogy. Elbow added an additional week of free writing to the start of his courses at Evergreen State College when he saw how useful the practice was in “building community” in the classroom. Elbow rails against grading because it interferes with his ability to connect meaningfully with his students. “Good writing teachers like student writing,” he explains, and “it’s hard to like something if we know we have to give it a D.”

In keeping with the anti-authoritarian commitment of process practitioners, students in a process classroom teach each other. Students form small groups to read aloud and comment on each other’s writing, while the teacher surveys the scene benignly. The students may be admonished to say two good, as well as two critical things about each other’s essay—a task that would tax the invention of Shakespeare. Many of the groups I have observed quickly turned their attention to more compelling matters, like last weekend’s parties or the newest sneakers. And no wonder, given the abysmal prose they are supposed to discuss. The following two paragraphs are from a student’s answer on CUNY’s writing-proficiency exam. The question was: “Do you think the personal life of a political candidate…should be considered a factor in determining his or her ability to do the job?”

“We are living in a world that’s getting worse everyday. And what we are doing nothing, just complaining about the other person’s life. We should stop because if we don’t stop by looking on every candidate lifestyle and focus more on how, we could make it better. We all gonna die of, hungry, because we wouldn’t have nothing to eat and no place to life.

“People tends to make mistake in life. We all are humans. That’s why we should never judge a person for the cover of a book. People change in life, most of them tends to learn from their mistake. We live in a world that we should learn to forgive and forget everyone mistake and move forward.”

While peer teaching may have value for more experienced student-writers, for the incompetent—which includes not just remedial students but increasing numbers of all incoming students—it is an egregious case of the blind leading the blind. It ignores the reason students are in remedial classes in the first place and violates the time-honored principle that one learns to write by reading good, not awful, writing.

The process school’s determination to break down hierarchy extends beyond the teacher-student divide. A pioneering freshman composition course at City College combines students who fail the CUNY writing exam with those who passed. Says Acting Provost Mike Aarons: “The idea behind the program [which is being replicated in other areas of the college] is that the more successful students help the less successful.”

Aarons might have added that another idea behind such programs is radical egalitarianism. Individual effort must go to raising the collectivity, not to raising oneself above the collectivity; individual success betrays the good of the whole. The course received a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education—apparently the federal government likes the idea of fighting elitism as well.

In a process classroom, content eclipses form. The college essay and an 18-year-old’s personality become one and the same. Effie Cochran, an English as a second language professor at Baruch College, gushes: “Here I am—teacher-confessor. All these [gay] people are coming out to me through autobiographical reports who wouldn’t come out to a priest.” One process professor recommends that the profession “pay more attention to the experiences of psychotherapists regarding role-modeling, sexual tension, and transference.”

Students who have been told in their writing classes to let their deepest selves loose on the page and not worry about syntax, logic, or form have trouble adjusting to their other classes. A student at St. Anselm’s College complained to her writing teacher that her humanities professor had prevented her from developing her ideas on Homer, Cicero and the Hebrew prophets. His sin? He had insisted on numerous references to the text and correct English prose. “In humanities,” she whined, “I have to remember a certain format and I have to back up every general statement with specific examples. Oh, and that word, ‘I,’ I just used. You would never see that word in one of my humanities papers.” In process-school jargon, the poor humanities student has been denied “access to a personal language.”

With its emphasis on personal experience and expression, the process school forgets that the ultimate task of college writing is to teach students how to think. In the personal essay, assertions need not be backed up by anything more than the author’s sincerity. According to Rolf Norgaard of the University of Colorado, evaluation then becomes a judgment upon students’ lives, their personalities, their souls. But how can you tell a student, he asks, that her experiences or family life were not terribly original or striking?

The process school of writing has spread well beyond college campuses. Washington Irving Elementary School in Chicago introduced process methods six years ago in the hope of improving students’ catastrophic performance in reading and writing. Teachers tossed out their red pencils and workbooks; from then on, students would simply write, unfettered by such enthusiasm-crushing methods as rote learning. Students worked in groups, grades were out, cooperation was in.

The initial response, euphoria, was short-lived. Student groups rarely completed their assignments. They made little progress in mechanics. Some teachers started giving grades and teaching the basics again. But when they handed out incompletes and tried to hold students to higher standards, they caught heat from both parents and the principal, who told them that their expectations were too high. Lesson: Once out of the bottle, the process genie is hard to get back in.

Derrida’s writing lessons

In the early 1980s, a few process teachers started to sense that something was deeply wrong. While they had been unleashing an orgy of self-expression in their classes, across the hall in the literature department, the hippest teachers were preaching that the self was a fiction, a mere product of language. The process theorists, in other words, stumbled across deconstruction. In the 1970s and 1980s, this was not difficult to do, since just about every field in the humanities during that period scrambled to parrot the impenetrable prose of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault.

What an embarrassment for the poor process teachers! Deconstructionism declared the self dead, and they had been assiduously cultivating it. And what to do about their favorite genre, the personal essay, which seems to presuppose a writing subject, a concept anathema to deconstructionists?

The solution to this dilemma demonstrates the resourcefulness of college professors today. While some process advocates, such as Elbow, have continued their former ways unchanged, many others have simply grafted deconstructive rhetoric onto a process methodology. The result is pedagogical chaos. Students are writing personal essays, but they are deconstructing them at the same time. Such writing assignments are designed with one sole purpose: to make the professor feel that he is at the cutting-edge. They have nothing to do with teaching writing.

Witness the rhetorical sleight of hand of Joel Haefner, a professor at Illinois State University. Haefner manages to demonstrate disdain for process pedagogy, while nevertheless preserving it. “Calls to revive the personal essay,” he writes in College English,

“carry a hidden agenda and rest on the shibboleth of individualism, and concomitantly, the ideology of American democracy…As we interrogate our assumption about the essay genre and its role in a “democratic” and “individualistic” pedagogy, we will find, I think, that it makes more sense to see the essay as a cultural product, as a special kind of collective discourse. Hence there is still a place for the “personal” essay in a collaborative pedagogy.”

This tortured reasoning may preserve Haefner’s credibility with the post-structuralists, but its practical result must tie students up in knots. Here are some of Haefner’s deconstructive writing projects that are intended to “critique the fiction of a singular author”: writing groups create a personal essay that purports to be the work of a single author; individual students write a personal essay using “we”; teams rewrite a personal essay from other singular viewpoints; and (this is my favorite) students are encouraged not to create a unified and coherent first-person-singular voice, but, rather, a mix of “I” speakers.

This borders on pedagogical malpractice. Here are students who are unable to write coherent paragraphs, and they are being encouraged to cultivate an incoherent writing voice.

Multicultural writing

But academia can be cruel. No sooner did writing teachers master deconstructive jargon than a new, improved version came along. After years on the top of the charts, deconstructionism has been pushed aside by multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is both the direct offspring of deconstructionism and its nemesis. The current obsession with racial, sexual, and ethnic difference grew directly out of deconstructionism’s obsession with so-called linguistic difference. But, whereas deconstructionism was a mandarin pursuit that had only contempt for political engagement, multiculturalism asserts the centrality of politics to every human endeavor.

For would-be composition theorists, the most important consequence of multiculturalism has been the reemergence of the self as the central focus of concern. But the new multicultural self is defined exclusively by racial, sexual, and ethnic identity. The multicultural writing classroom is a workshop on racial and sexual oppression. Rather than studying possessive pronouns, students are learning how language silences women and blacks.

As New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein described in his recent book, Dictatorship of Virtue, the University of Texas at Austin exploded in controversy in 1990 over a proposed writing course called “Writing about Difference.” The course text was Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, by Paula Rothenberg, a national leader in the movement to inject race and gender into every aspect of the curriculum. “One assumption of this book,” writes Rothenberg, “is that racism and sexism pervade American culture, that they are learned at an early age and reinforced throughout life by a variety of institutions that are part of growing up and living in the United States.” Students in the new writing course would use the text’s readings to explore their own role as oppressors or victims.

In a rare victory for common sense, the course was cancelled after a bitter fight. Most colleges have not been so lucky, however. Students in Muhlenberg College’s Third World Experience composition course, for example, study works by third-world authors to learn how colonialism and gender each have their unique system of oppression. According to two critics of the course at Muhlenberg, it primarily requires that students “wade through the material, applaud, and announce its authenticity.”

Effie Cochran of Baruch College assigns her remedial-writing students role-playing exercises so that women can vent their anger at the discrimination they suffer in and out of school. Whether these performances improve students’ writing skills is anyone’s guess.

The personal essay remains a cornerstone for the multicultural classroom; it is a special favorite of feminists. But it has been supplemented by “ethnography.” David Bleich’s students at the University of Rochester conduct personal ethnographies on social relations in the classroom, observing how their gender, race, and class allegedly determine their response to literary works. The most frequently assigned topic for student ethnographers, however, is popular culture—in other words, describe and respond to your favorite rock video.

Every writing theory of the past 30 years has come up with reasons why it’s not necessary to teach grammar and style. For the multiculturalists, the main reason is that grammatical errors signify that the author is politically engaged. According to Min-Zhan Lu of Drake University, the “individual consciousness is necessarily heterogeneous, contradictory, and in process. The writer writes at the site of conflict.”

It is the goal of current writing theory to accentuate that conflict. Today’s theorists berate former City College professor Mina Shaugnessy, whose book, Errors and Expectations, heralded the remedial-writing movement, for trying to introduce her students—however gently—to academic prose. Min-Zhan Lu write: “We need to contest teaching methods which offer to ‘cure’ all signs of conflict and struggle which the dominant conservative ideology of the 1990s seeks to contain.”

There is a basic law at work in current composition theory: As students’ writing gets worse, the critical vocabulary used to assess it grows ever more pompous. James Zebrowski of Syracuse University claims that doing ethnographies makes students “constructors of knowledge.” John Trimbur of Worcester Polytechnic Institute describes what he calls “post-process, post-cognitivist theory”: It “represents literacy as an ideological arena and composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposition themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions.” According to Trimbur, “literacy crises result not from declining skills but from the contention of various interested representations of literacy.” In other words, students who can’t read and write are simply offering up another version of literacy, which the oppressive conservative ideology refuses to recognize. Such double-talk harks back to the 1960s, when open-admissions students were described as coming from a culture where “orality” was dominant.

Wanted: writers

The bottom line to all this nonsense is drastically lowered expectations of student skills. Marilyn Sternglass, a composition theorist at City College, argues that students should be able to pick up the topics for CUNY’s writing-proficiency exam before the test is administered because “responding to the questions cold makes too many demands on students. If they concentrate on content, their mechanics will suffer; if they concentrate on mechanics, they lose their train of thought.” It never occurs to her that such a zero-sum tradeoff indicates precisely what the test is supposed to measure: the inability to write.

Professors are expending vast amounts of energy making excuses for their students. At a 1994 composition conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, Geraldine de Luca, director of freshman English at Brooklyn College, railed against grammatical rules. Though teaching rules in response to individual students’ questions, she said, can be “empowering, the rules have a way of taking over. And some teachers think that’s fine: ‘It’s about time they learned some grammar,’ they say. ‘I knew this stuff when I was in the fifth grade.’ But in what time, in what community, in what country?” asked Luca melodramatically. “Even the concept of error,” she concluded, “is beginning to feel repugnant to me.”

Today, at CUNY and elsewhere, there is a growing movement to abolish the distinction between remedial writing and reading courses and regular freshman courses, on the grounds that placing students in remedial courses injures their self-esteem. Remedial-writing courses at Baruch College and elsewhere are now known as “English as a Second Dialect,” or ESD, courses. Proudly displaying their knowledge of Foucault, composition theorists argue that the category “remedial education” is merely an artificial construct imposed by the ruling class on the oppressed. Marilyn Sternglass of City College quickly corrected me when I asked about students who needed remedial work: “They are ‘judged’ to need remedial classes,” she retorted haughtily.

Professors who exempt students from the very standards that governed them when they were in school feel compassionate, noble, and powerful. But the professors’ power is limited to their world. Though they may be willing to overlook spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors in favor of a “holistic” approach to student writing, employers are clearly not as generous, as the census survey suggests.

[Heather Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an M.A. at Cambridge University. She holds the J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, and is a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal] – Via Will Fitzhugh.