“Research has shown”

Diana Senechal raised a question at a training session for teachers of English language learners:

“There must be other factors —”

“Research has shown,” the session leader said.

“But how can it be if —”

“Research has shown.”

Before that day, I had thought of research as investigation of uncertainties; now it seemed to put an end to all questions. If research showed something, well, there was nothing you could say; you had to go along with it. “Research has shown” — the phrase struck me with its vagueness, its exaltation of research (regardless of quality), and its use as a mallet to quash discussion.

Diana Senechal, Mind Over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

I just got this book from the library and went straight to the chapter about “research has shown,” thinking of a friend who has long been skeptical about that mantra. In English studies, “research has shown” might preface a wildly general claim about writing instruction based on a researcher’s (i.e., a teacher’s) experiment with one semester’s classes. Research has shown: end of discussion.

A few passages from Senechal’s Republic of Noise
“A little out of date” : Buzzwords and education : Fighting distraction : Literature and reverence : “Greater seriousness”

“Greater seriousness”

One more passage from Diana Senechal:

Beyond giving students a foundation, schools must teach them what commitment means. Without apology, they should teach students to read, write, and practice without any distractions from the Internet, cell phone, or TV, and to make a daily habit of this. It doesn't matter if they claim to know how to “multitask”; multitasking amounts to compromise, and they need to learn to offer more of themselves. Schools should also make use of technology but should also teach students how to do without it. Otherwise they will depend on text messages during class, musical practice, lectures, daydreams, and even rest. Over the long run, the setting aside of distractions will give students permission to take the work seriously. Many young people latch onto a casual attitude about their studies; they need to be helped out of this. Many secretly long to be pushed into greater seriousness.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

“Many secretly longed to be pushed into greater seriousness”: yes, or at least some. I see it every semester.

I recommend Republic of Noise to any reader who believes, as Senechal does, that a life of thinking and feeling requires a measure of solitude — not hermetic isolation but the freedom of introspection. And I also recommend this book to any reader who believes that “collaborative learning environments” and “facilitated team activities” and the like represent a way forward in education. As Richard Mitchell once wrote, “It is only in a mind that the work of the mind can be done.”

Also from Republic of Noise
“A little out of date”
Buzzwords and education
Fighting distraction
Literature and reverence

[The sentence from Richard Mitchell appears in The Graves of Academe (1981).]

Ownlife

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

This passage made me think immediately of Creon’s rebuke of Antigone: “Aren’t you ashamed to have a mind apart from theirs?”

Related posts
All OCA George Orwell posts : Antigone in Ferguson : Literature and reverence : Modest proposals : Susan Cain on “the New Groupthink”

[The line from Antigone is in Paul Woodruff’s translation, from Sophocles’s Theban Plays, trans. Peter Meineck and Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). For an excellent discussion of Creon’s question and Antigone’s apartness, see Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).]

David Bromwich on higher education

David Bromwich:

[H]igher education is the learning of certain habits, above all a sustained attention to things outside one’s familiar circuit of interests; and it is the beginning of a work of self-knowledge that will decompose many of one’s given habits and given identities. In these respects the aims of education are deeply at odds with the aims of any coherent and socializing culture. The former is critical and ironic; the latter purposeful and supervisory.

Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

[From the back cover: ”In this eloquent book a distinguished scholar criticizes attacks on liberal education by ideologies of the right and left, arguing that both groups see education as a means to indoctrinate students in specific cultural and political dogmas. David Bromwich calls for a return to the teaching of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and tolerance of other points of view, values that he claims are the essence of a true liberal education.” I found my way to this book after reading Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise.]

Literature and reverence

Diana Senechal again:

The Chorus in Antigone says that he who honors the laws of the land and the justice of the gods will be hupsipolis, that is, he will have a great city. One could say this about literature: if students learn to enter it and honor it, they will have the makings of a rich life. They will also have an opening to true difference; by immersing themselves in the sole voice of another, they will start to hear their own voice, assenting, questioning, disputing, singing along, starting a new poem or song. Much of this literature is difficult for readers today; the ideas may seem distant, the words obscure, or the sentences long and complex. It is the teacher’s duty to help the student enter the work, and this takes time and care. It cannot be done when students in a given class are reading many different works at the same time. It requires a certain reverence — not the reverence of calling an author “great” just because everyone else does, but the reverence of treating the work, for a little while, as the most important thing in the room and mind.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

Fighting distraction

Diana Senechal:

To fight distraction is to defend something that matters, something that requires devotion of the mind. This is part of the meaning of study: to honor things through thought and longing. Many dismiss such yearning as impractical; we have enough on our hands, they say, with the daily scramble and the demands of the age. But yearning can pull us out of the scramble; it can calm the scramble itself. The teacher who longs to read about Chinese history will set aside time for it in the evenings. The boy who longs to see a falling star will stay up late, looking up at the sky for hours. in Moby-Dick, it is the Rachel, returning from a vain search for the captain’s lost sons, that ultimately rescues Ishmael from the water near the sunken Pequod and makes the story possible. If we abandon such yearning and seeking, if we defer to the petty demon of “getting it now,” then nothing will be left but our vicissitudes, and we will have no will or thought but to follow them.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

Also from Republic of Noise
“A little out of date”

Hoagies, pizzas, and English studies

Remember the culture wars? Here’s a reminder, from Joseph Berger’s article “U.S. Literature: Canon Under Siege” (The New York Times, January 6, 1988):

There are those who continue to uphold a traditional standard of literary quality, arguing that students should essentially read works whose merit has been established over the years. But there is a rising number who contend the idea of an enduring pantheon of writers and their works is an elitist one largely defined by white men who are Northeastern academics and critics.

Choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck, they hold, involves political and cultural distinctions more than esthetic ones.

“It’s no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza,” said Houston Baker, professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania. “I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards.”¹

I, too, like hoagies and pizza. But in literary study, as at lunch, one is making choices, all the time. Houston Baker’s analogy establishes an equality of foodstuffs, or writers. It’s all good. But what if one is offered a choice between a mediocre hoagy and a terrific pizza? Between a hoagy and a Twinkie? Between a pizza and a jar of Fluff? Surely some foods are more nourishing and satisfying than others. And surely some writers are more deserving of attention than others.

Baker’s analogy becomes even more tenuous if we keep to a single food. Since Buck and Woolf are novelists, why not regard them both as hoagies, or both as pizzas? How then is one to choose? In the world of food, of course, such matters are the stuff of endless debate: deep-dish? thin crust? And whose crust? Who has the best crust in town? And why should anyone sneer at Papa John’s? It’s curious that in seeking to remove aesthetic differences as a basis for choice, Baker should offer an analogy from a realm in which aesthetic differences are always and everywhere crucial.

One reason for the general collapse of English studies in recent years is, I believe, the tacit, never argued-for assumption that Baker’s position is the correct one, that it is inappropriate to deem some works more deserving of attention than others, that all cultural productions are worthy material for the mill of critical practice. Thus departments drop requirements that students study x, y, and z, whichever names those variables might represent. What’s so often missing from English studies is a sense of reverence for necessary texts — “not,” as Diana Senechal writes, “the reverence of calling an author ‘great’ just because everyone else does, but the reverence of treating the work, for a little while, as the most important thing in the room and mind.” In the absence of reverence, the object of critical inquiry can serve only to allow its exegete a false feeling of mastery, as he or she dissolves binaries and exposes ideological assumptions and comes away (yet again) feeling smarter than that unsuspecting sap, the text.

A claim to offer entry to great works of the literary imagination (which need not mean “dead white men”) is English studies’ distinctive claim to a place in the endeavor of liberal learning. As far as I can see, it’s the only claim, the one thing that distinguishes English from “communications” and media studies. To return to the realm of food: when someone is in town for a few days and wants to know where to eat, we have to be able to reply with conviction: You must go here. You can’t pass up the chance.

Related posts
Moby-Dick at Harvard
Verlyn Klinkenborg on the English major

¹ In a 1992 interview with Michael Bérubé, Baker points out that the Woolf–Buck comparison was Berger’s:

in the homology that came out, the first two terms were his own terms. I never mentioned the names of those authors at all. He made those up.

“Hybridity in the Center: An Interview with Houston A. Baker, Jr.,” African American Review (1992).

So Berger must have posed a question with Buck and Woolf as examples, and Baker replied with hoagies and pizza. As Bérubé points out, the two foods suggest the course of Baker’s career (Yale, Penn). “Yes! I like that!” was Baker’s response.

“A little out of date”

Diana Senechal:

There is nothing quite so dangerous as trying to be always up to date, for one simple reason: just moments after one becomes current, one falls behind. To keep from falling behind, one must stay alert to every update. To step back, to spend time on something not immediately relevant, is to risk “missing out,” losing touch with the lickety-split relay of the latest, or so it seems. . . .

The pressure to keep up with the times not only distracts and dizzies us; it upsets and distorts our values. Once we subscribe to the “cutting edge,” we lose the ability to judge it. We grab it, grab some opinions about it, and grab some more. What others are saying about the latest gadget or fashionable concept becomes more important than what we ourselves think. We are told that if we just get it now, or embrace it now, we will be at an advantage. Thus to think in any sort of depth, to judge things on our own, we must risk falling a little out of date, a little out of authority.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

Bertrand Russell on reverence in education

My son Ben pointed me to an essay by Bertrand Russell, “Education as a Political Institution” (The Atlantic Monthly , June 1916). An excerpt:

In education, with its codes of rules emanating from a government office, with its large classes and fixed curriculum and overworked teachers, with its determination to produce a dead level of glib mediocrity, the lack of reverence for the child is all but universal. Reverence requires imagination and vital warmth; it requires most imagination in respect of those who have least actual achievement or power. The child is weak and superficially foolish; the teacher is strong, and in an everyday sense wiser than the child. The teacher without reverence, or the bureaucrat without reverence, easily despises the child for these outward inferiorities. He thinks it his duty to “mould” the child; in imagination he is the potter with the clay. And so he gives to the child some unnatural shape which hardens with age, producing strains and spiritual dissatisfactions, out of which grow cruelty and envy and the belief that others must be compelled to undergo the same distortions.

The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to “mould” the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. He feels an unaccountable humility in the presence of a child — a humility not easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self-confidence of many parents and teachers. He feels the outward helplessness of the child, the appeal of dependence, the responsibility of a trust. His imagination shows him what the child may become, for good or evil; how its impulses may be developed or thwarted, how its hopes must be dimmed and the life in it grow less living, how its trust will be bruised and its quick desires replaced by brooding will. All this gives him a longing to help the child in its own battle, to strengthen it and equip it, not for some outside end proposed by the state or by any other impersonal authority, but for the ends which the child’s own spirit is obscurely seeking.

“[N]ot for some outside end proposed by the state or by any other impersonal authority, but for the ends which the child’s own spirit is obscurely seeking”: a strong rejoinder to the utilitarian mantra of college-ready and workplace-ready .

Thanks, Ben.

Related posts
Diana Senechal on literature and reverence
Michael Oakeshott on education

Buzzwords and education

Diana Senechal on ”the utilitarian view of education”:

[I]n recent years it has overtaken education discourse. It can be attributed to the loss of a literary culture, the introduction of business language and models into education, and the resultant streamlining of language. Schools and industries have become less concerned with the possible meanings of words, their allusions and nuances, than with buzzwords that proclaimed to funders and inspectors that the approved things are being done — goal setting, “targeted” professional development, identification of “best practices,” and so forth. Thus we lose the means to question and criticize the narrow conceptions of success that have so much power in our lives.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

I should know better, but I am still surprised by how readily academic communities embrace buzzwords and platitudes. Everything, it seems, is subject to critical inquiry except the language that purports to define our purposes.

Also from Republic of Noise
“A little out of date”
Fighting distraction
Literature and reverence