Convoluted Theory

Durham, N. C.—Employers are finding it harder and harder to find staffers who can write clearly and coherently, and colleges and universities are largely to blame, Professor Nan Miller told the audience at a conference here.

“Employers say, ‘Recent graduates are trained in academic writing but we find that writing too verbose and wandering,’” Professor Miller said at the John William Pope Center’s annual conference here. “Do students and taxpayers get their money’s worth?” was the theme of the conference sponsored by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Professor Miller served for many years as director of the writing center at Meredith College in Raleigh. She has experienced the results of English composition instruction both as an instructor and as a parent of two sons who are college graduates.

“Composition theory became a specialty in the 1970s,” Professor Miller explained. The goals of composition theory were “to prepare students to write in disciplines other than English” and to “help them find an authentic voice.”

To this end, these classes used the group breakout approach wherein students were bundled together in groups. They also learned composition theory not from an instructor but from a “circulating facilitator,” usually a graduate student who insisted on being called by his or her first name.

Professor Miller taught composition and literature at North Carolina State University for five years before moving on to Meredith. None of her students ever dreamed of calling her Nan or thinking of her as circulating or facilitating.

Her love of literature leaves her particularly distressed by New Age approaches to the teaching of writing. Most English Composition facilitators, and the administrators who protect them, view literature as a “distraction” and argue that “You can get literature in other courses.”

You can, Professor Miller concedes, but those courses usually have titles like “Shakespeare from a Marxist point of view.” Such courses, Professor Miller finds, tend to be heavy on criticism and light on content—specifically Shakespeare’s.

Professor Miller found that students usually grade their own papers in these courses. She pressed administrators at NC State and other schools for their rationale for this Age of Aquarius approach to the teaching of writing. She was told that:

• “Research shows that students cannot pay attention for more than 20 minutes.

• “The goal is to show students how to write like members of different communities.

• “You need to consider that holistic schooling is more effective than traditional grading.

And:

• “Textbooks inhibit writing.”

A venerable physics professor attending the event pointed out to Professor Miller that in his student days, English composition was a subject that most college freshmen had already learned in high school. Such memories give us pause and force us to ask yet again: How progressive is progressive education?

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.