Kids These Days!

I was a writing tutor for four years as an undergraduate. The students who came to me for help were almost always enrolled in Developmental Writing on Composition I. Most of them were unprepared to write at the college level.

The students were usually deficient in two important areas. First, they didn't grasp the mechanics of writing. They had very little understanding of grammar or style. Naturally, I spent a lot of time on comma splices, run-on sentences, and awkward constructions. Often, students wrote with an inauthentic voice. In their attempts to write academically, they wrote stilted sentences and attempted to wield words which were beyond the limits of their vocabularies. These problems were fixable.

Helping students construct arguments from a series of poorly connected musings was more difficult. I found that most of these students had no understanding of argumentation, so even the traditional tripartite essay presented them with great challenges.

It's so easy to pen a jeremiad against our students' ill preparation and to jump on the bandwagon of decline. Older generations bemoan the decline and ill preparation of the youth. "Kids these days" can't write a full sentences. They can't make an argument. They don't know the difference between a conjunction and an adverb. But these claims are not new. Texting is making them stupid. But these claims are nothing new. (PDF link) You might protest, "Well, the texting claim is certainly new." It isn't. Writing teachers have regularly protested new technologies like the pencil eraser. Texting is just the latest burr in our very old saddle. (In Phaedrus, Plato objected to literacy.)

What does this have to do with the English Department or English as a discipline? It seems to me that the United States Higher Education system is near the breaking point of a bubble inflated by guaranteed student loans and the (I think) misplaced idea that college is the only sensible route for students who hope to achieve any degree of success in life. These poor students, who might be excellent physicians, plumbers, electricians, microchip manufacturers, medical technicians, or participants in any number of high paying careers, are being squeezed through a system that was designed to turn out really excellent clergy and lawyers. Not every student is suited to a career in letters. But our education bubble treats them all as if they are.

When the bubble bursts, the English department will change, just as it has changed dramatically in the 150 or so years since it was first created as a catchall department for various language and rhetoric-related disciplines. In 1967, Parker wondered if federal funding for education would divorce literature from composition. I wonder if the bursting of the educational bubble will create much more dramatic changes in English education.

I'm certain that in 50 years, writing instructors will bemoan their student's inability to write effectively as they romanticize the idyllic turn of the century when students were so much better prepared. I also think that most of these instructors will not be English professors. They will not have studied literature, poetry, or linguistics. I fear that they will be teaching for an hourly wage on a 12 month contract. But I don't know the future. I hope it's not true, because I would like to be a traditional English professor one day.