Daniel Lattier | August 8, 2016
Six months ago we shared a frightening observation from Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at Notre Dame who has also taught at Princeton and Georgetown. He described his students as “know-nothings… devoid of any substantial knowledge.”
More recently, a respected author and English professor at Providence College in Rhode Island has echoed Deneen’s concerns.
In an essay titled “Exercises in Unreality: The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization,” Anthony Esolen describes a university climate today in which many students and professors no longer possess the knowledge and skills that their peers of previous generations took for granted:
“But what if you know hardly anything about anything at all? That is an exaggeration, but it does capture much of what I must confront as a professor of English right now, even at our school, which accepts only a small fraction of students who apply for admission. Nor, I’m afraid, does it apply only to freshmen. It applies also to professors.”
He explains:
He explains:
“I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, ‘Your verb here does not agree with your subject.’ That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for ‘formal’ writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.”
Esolen’s above lament is supported not only by similar laments from his fellow professors, but also by statistics that show only a minority of American students are proficient in reading and writing, and by the fact that billions of dollars each year are spent on remedial courses in college.
Do you think that things can be turned around in the near future? Or are we destined to slip further into an educational dark age?
Query the Ridgewood library, the RHS library, and the RHS humanities department as to how many volumes of “English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats” they collectively possess.
I think that the Prof thinks a lot of himself and very little of his coworkers and students. Sounds like a burn-out.
Perhaps a change of career would cheer him up.
Maybe he can become a financial advisor. Seems like everyone in Ridgewood is doing it.
There is no more education – it is mostly indoctrination.
Everybody thinks that they are smarter than everyone else. Nothing new here.
Reading specific books does not make a person smarter. Using a book list as some kind of standard makes them look silly. I know some very smart people, we never doscuss old books.
Sadly, education has evolved from the art of learning to the practice of preparing students for the next test or the next grade.
Notice how his list includes all old white men. What about Nobel Laureates like Alice Munro, Elfriede Jelinek, both my favorites. Doris Lessing, for god’s sake. What about Elena Ferrante, of today. And hey, what about Emily Dickinson. Lists must omit oldies who are no longer relevant and include the exciting great writers of today. Or the teachers will lose students. The professors of today are chicken shit , afraid to acknowledge great writers today. Can’t acknowledge them because they don’t really understand literature, they just parrot what they were taught years ago. Of course they lose their audience. Alan Ginsberg, what about that Howl poet, very relevant for today. Sentences don’t have to have conventional, stick in your ass grammar to be communicative and meaningful and to capture an audience. The guy is asshole. Am I spelling asshole accurately, Professor Turd.
I’m sorry, but I would not pay any amount of money to have my child in his class. He sounds like a narcissist. I would much rather have my kids learning skills where they will become employable in this century. There is plenty of time when they are out of school to read that exhausting list of authors.
I suppose the person who tweeted “lot of bad dudes out there” could be included as someone who know hardly anything about anything at all?
5 :30am, western civilization has traditionally been conveyed via books, some of the best of which were written and first published well before you were born. What sense does it make to confine oneself to contemporary authors?
The art of writing is dying, 6:59am and 8:42am. The average high school and college student is losing the ability to think with any semblance of discipline, logic or creativity. It’s a crying shame and all you can think to do is shoot the messenger.