Critical Mass

By Daniel Gelernter

And now for an update on the state of high schools for those who are no longer there:

You might expect that high school English teachers would actually know how to speak English. But many English teachers in my high school seemed to have only a causal acquaintance with the English language, and I expect that the situation is similar all over America. My English teachers often had inadequate vocabulary and command of the language. Beyond this they would commonly (with gross unprofessionalism) inject their own politics into assignments and class conversations. Friends tell me that this problem is not unique to my school. It’s an epidemic: the teacher who can’t teach – less obvious than the bus driver who can’t drive.

I have heard teachers mispronounce such words as “truculent” and “lyre,” and I have heard teachers demonstrate that they do not know the meaning of words they use – I was told (in writing) to “critique without judging.”

Some teachers hand out assignments that are so poorly worded you can’t understand them. One “free response” assignment from my senior year was:

“Write about MEMORY – Any particular memories – good or bad – that ‘haunt’ you. Any thoughts about how we remember, what triggers memories… and even how we forget.”

It sounds like a second grade assignment (or an assignment written by a second-grader). The sentences are incomplete and so are the thoughts; the use of capitals and quotations marks was arbitrary.

Nit-picking? But English teachers are supposed to write nit-free English! Another senior-year high school assignment, possibly the worst I ever got:

“This narrative structure of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved might be compared to a patchwork quilt – nonlinear, fragmented, woven bits and pieces of memories…As a response to this novel, we will create our own patchwork quilt.” (Emphasis in the original)

The assignment tells us that we must each design three patches to contribute to our final project for this novel, and closes with a quote about America from “The Rev. Jesse Jackson.” The assignment is written in a directionless and arbitrary manner, and is further remarkable for its subtly ironic (and unintentional) explanation of why the novel was so bad.

On top of all this, English sentence structure is routinely altered to accommodate politics (invariably left-wing) – one teacher would force herself to alternate using “he” and “she” when speaking of an unknown person – sometimes using both in the same sentence! Sometimes she would try to follow “he” with “or she,” would often forget, and have to tack “or she” to the end of the sentence.

The problem was bad at my high school – a blue-chip public school in a rich (and “intellectual”) suburb of a wealthy state. How is the rest of the country getting on? High school English teachers have put their students on a fast track to illiteracy.