Several readers have asked that I regale them with anecdotes about contemporary education and its woes. When I think back on four decades in the classroom, I don’t know where to start. Like Polonius, I could say that some memorable incidents were comical, some tragical, and some tragical-comical.
Let me begin with one story that illustrates an important principle frequently forgotten in our technology-ridden and theory-clotted schools: No education is an atom better than the teacher standing in front of the class. If the person teaching students is deficient or deluded or weird, the education dispensed to those students will be similarly flawed.
About fifteen years ago I taught in a college in New York City. It was a comparatively small place with a network of friendly collegiality among the various departments, and that included the higher-ups in administration.
Upon the retirement of the school’s elderly president, the trustees and faculty naturally hired a replacement. In this case they chose a southerner who had run a school somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line. The new president’s wife was one of those chirping, burbling, can’t-shut-the-hell-up southern belles of the sort that Tennessee Williams was so adept at describing. And of course she was taken on as full-time faculty in the English department when her husband got the job of president, despite the fact that her only degree was from some cornpone community college in the sticks. That’s American academia—lots of talk about justice and merit and credentials, and lots of sub rosa corruption.
Anyhow, while I was teaching in the school’s Department of Classical Languages, this tedious little magnolia was assigned by the English department to cover a section of freshman composition. It just so happened that one of the students in her class was also registered in my Greek and Roman Civilization course.
The student was a highly intelligent Taiwanese woman, about thirty years old, who was here on a student visa. Her command of English was somewhat shaky but she improved noticeably every week, and it helped that she lived with a family of articulate and well-read Americans. She was doing fairly well in my course, with some help from a tutor at school, and with the encouragement of her American hosts.
Well, one day this student came to my office with a problem. She said that her composition teacher (the aforementioned magnolia) had given a totally off-the-wall assignment, and as a student she didn’t know how to handle it. It took her some time to explain the matter, but it boiled down to this: she was to buy a current issue of a popular magazine at a news stand, and then find a copy of that same magazine from forty or more years earlier. And then she was to write an in-depth analysis of what the differences in the two issues revealed about changes in American culture between the two issue dates.
I thought to myself that such an assignment would be more appropriate for a sociology or a history of culture class than for a section of freshman composition; and I tried to imagine the mindset of the sort of inept teacher who would give this wacky task to a class of foreigners trying to improve their skills in English. What agenda prompted this crazy assignment from the president’s wife? I was eventually to find out.
I told the Taiwanese student that she’d have to buy a magazine that had been around for a very long time, and I suggested The Ladies’ Home Journal, which I knew had been published since the 1880s. She did so, and by the sheerest luck the student also managed to find a copy of The Ladies’ Home Journal dated 1953 in a Manhattan bookshop that specialized in old paper ephemera. Now she could tackle her assignment.
Since my Taiwanese student was not intimately familiar with American life and habits, she asked me to sit down with her to look over both magazines, and explain anything that was opaque to her perceptions. I agreed.
Within five minutes, a few things were glaringly obvious. The first was the appalling decline in the level of literacy that the newer issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal evinced when compared with the older. The 1953 magazine was well written, sophisticated, meticulously edited, and used a range of vocabulary and a prose style that were strikingly adult and high-toned. In contrast, the language of the current version of the magazine was sloppy, slangy, and dumbed-down colloquial, with a vocabulary that did not rise above the fourth-grade basal reader. Despite the glossy paper and the upscale ads, the new magazine was intellectually shoddy, and redolent of the cheesiest elements of mediagenic pop-culture. It was deeply embarrassing for me as an American to point this out to a foreign student.
Second was subject matter. The older issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal had an impressive array of serious, competent writing. Besides specialty pieces on cooking and homemaking and child-rearing aimed at a female readership, the 1953 issue also contained creditable short stories and poems, intelligent discussion and commentary, human interest articles, and even a thoughtful essay on the geopolitics of the Korean War.
On the other hand, the current issue had nothing but brainless hype and spin about dieting, weight-loss, health workouts, vitamins, nip-and-tuck surgery, cosmetics, dating and sex tips, lifestyle trivia, celebrity gossip, and fashion trends in clothing—all tarted up in that breezily vapid and posturingly chic prose style that I call “Sex-and-the-City Breathless.” It was disgusting. The 1953 issue had been written for intelligent and thoughtful women. The current issue was directed towards airhead bimbos.
I asked myself “Is this the triumph of feminism? Turning a respected women’s magazine into what was now basically a handbook for sluttish vogueing? God help us.”
However, the most important difference completely escaped my male eye. It took female perception—that of my Taiwanese student—to notice it. She said to me “In the older magazine, there are many photographs of mature women. Many of them are past childbearing age, and many of them are probably grandmothers. There are also several pictures of plain women. In the new magazine, there is no photograph of any woman older than twenty-five, and all of the women are exceptionally pretty.”
I went back and carefully re-examined both issues page by page. Sure enough, my student was right. In the current issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, older and plain women simply did not exist. They had been swallowed up in an Orwellian memory-hole.
My student and I then discussed the outlines of her in-depth analysis. We agreed that American culture in the forty or so years between 1953 and 1995 had become less literate, less intelligent, and less articulate. In addition, it had sunk into a youth-obsessed, health-crazed, fashion-conscious shallowness. Insofar as these two magazines were concerned, the evidence was as plain as a pikestaff: a profound cultural decline had set in, one that manifested itself in the worst sort of glitzy consumerism and narcissism. In addition, we agreed, attitudes towards older women had shifted from respect to utter indifference and amnesia. My student thanked me for my help, and went home to compose her paper.
About three weeks later she returned to my office in tears. She showed me her paper. On it was a huge “F” with a snippy notation from the president’s wife that she had “obviously misunderstood the assignment.” I was amazed, and I asked the student if she had discussed her grade with her composition teacher. “Yes,” she sobbed. “And the teacher said that I had come to ‘unacceptable conclusions about cultural change in the United States.’ That is why I failed.”
I asked to look at her paper. As far as I could see it was adequately written, with no glaring errors in grammar or spelling. It was neatly typed. Its conclusions were plausibly presented, and defensible. A sane instructor in a freshman composition course would have given it a B+ at the least.
What the hell happened? I’ll tell you what happened, dear reader. The president’s wife was not just a loudmouthed southern magnolia. She was also a kneejerk liberal feminist from a backwater state. And as my friend Derek Burgoyne has said, “Liberalism is always stronger, stupider, and more intolerant in the provinces.” As a politically correct lemming, the magnolia couldn’t entertain the idea that cultural decline might happen, or the corollary that modern women might be more self-absorbed and shallower than their mothers and grandmothers. And on a personal level, as a woman in her late fifties, she couldn’t tolerate the suggestion that one of the results of feminism was to encourage younger, sexier women to be narcissistically selfish, while relegating women her own age to the slagheap. That must have really stung.
But what in fact had this teacher wanted from her class in this assignment? The Taiwanese student found out quickly after consulting with other students in the section, ones who had gotten passing grades. Papers receiving the highest commendations were those that said women had made great strides towards independence and self-sufficiency in forty years; or that American culture was now more open and tolerant; or that opportunities were available now that had not been there in the past; or that our nation had become more energetic and “global.” In short, this dumb southern bitch wanted her students to sing a paean to progress and enlightenment. She wanted the rah-rah optimism of a football coach’s pep-talk. She wanted a ritual condemnation of the bad old past, and cheerleader arm-pumping for the new America of social freedom and multiculturalism.
My Taiwanese student hadn’t provided any of that. She had looked at the evidence and seen something rather different, and not at all worthy of celebration. And our southern magnolia, with all the petulant rage of Scarlett O’Hara, had lashed out in resentful anger and given my student a failing grade.
I advised the student to lodge a formal complaint with the Grade Appeals Committee and she did so, but nothing came of it. No one in the English department had the balls to stand up to an imperious harridan who was married to the school’s president.
I made sure, however, that every faculty member with whom I was acquainted heard the full story of what had happened. Some were just as indignant as I; most were more phlegmatically cynical. All agreed that the Taiwanese student had gotten a raw deal. And almost everyone seemed resigned to the fact that American education in general was in a spiral of decline and debasement, and that this development was a lot more serious than what had happened to The Ladies’ Home Journal. But only a very few would privately admit that part of the problem lay with the ideologized freaks whom we were allowing to preside over our classrooms.
