Often when I teach in schools I begin by asking the class, Why am I here? It’s an existential question although the kids invariably answer it directly – “To teach us about writing”. The next question, Why write? usually elicits some nervous laughter, a moment of silence, until someone says “Because we will need to use writing in our jobs.” Beyond the odd misconception that writing is important only if it’s vocational, is the odd concept of ‘use’. As if writing is a product they might need to achieve some goal– you use a hammer, use a lawnmower – and not a process of thinking, of value in itself. In today’s NYT Verlyn Klinkenborg argues the decline in students studying the Humanities, this “rush to make education pay off presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring.” While students even at our most prestigious universities can “assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax” they can’t write clearly, simply, attentive to their thoughts, emotions, and the world around them. It’s not just that there is a narrowing in the way people think about college – parents, students, and yes, teachers too. A reduction of education to vocational training. It’s a narrowing in the way people think. There seems to be an unwillingness, inability, or perhaps fear of teaching people how to string ideas together in a causal sequence. How to analyze, synthesize, extrapolate. Because ultimately this leads to questions. And we’re living during a period when everywhere you turn, people want simple answers. Those who question – Manning, Assange, Snowden – are portrayed as dangers to our society. It wasn’t just one conservative commentator telling a woman on a talk show to “know your place, shut your mouth.” It is now our whole culture. Every time you attempt to put words down that look deeply, honestly, at your life and the world around you, aren’t you really trying to address that question, Why am I here? What are the forces trying to prevent that? And why?
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 12:04:24 +0000