This
1886 Cornell English Syllabus May Explain Why College Students Can’t Write, by
Annie Holmquist 4/28/18
According to the Nation’s Report Card,
only 27 percent of 8th graders attain proficiency
in writing. But no problem, right? They’re just leaving middle school. Give
them a few years under the instruction of high school English instructors and
all will be well.
That seems to be wishful thinking, for
the Nation’s Report Card shows that writing proficiency is still 27 percent by
the time students head to college. Unfortunately, college doesn’t improve the
writing woes of American students either. As writing expert John Maguire explains in The Washington
Post:
“The failure of many of today’s college
students to write decently, even after years of instruction, became headline
news not long ago when a well-researched study of college student learning was
published as a book under the title “Academically Adrift:
Limited Learning on College Campuses.”
Its authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, found that 45 percent of 2,300
students at 24 colleges showed no
significant improvement in
critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore
years. …
Millions of young men and women sit in
freshman composition classrooms each fall semester, but if the Arum report is
right, nearly half will write just as badly in their junior years as when they
started college.”
Maguire goes on to ask: “Why aren’t they
learning? There are multiple causes. One is that schools admit students who
can’t write and then pack them into comp courses taught by adjuncts. But the main problem, I think, is that the colleges are not really trying
to teach students to write clear sentences. Not anymore. First-semester writing
courses now cover rhetorical strategies, research, awareness of audience, youth
civic activism — everything except the production of clear sentences.”
Curious about Macguire’s statement that
colleges no longer teach students the basics of writing, I dug around for
freshman English syllabi from past and present. The following description comes from a present-day
First-Year Writing Seminar syllabus at Cornell University:
See this in the original article. It
doesn’t cover the basics.
While the description does hint that
some instruction in foundational writing techniques is present, the overall
tone conveys the loftier, higher-level approach to writing that Maguire insists
is the norm on today’s campuses.
An 1886 freshman
composition syllabus from
Cornell University takes a completely different approach, however. Instead of
focusing on audience, or proper citation formatting, or whether a paper has
drawn from a wide enough variety of sources, a majority of the class focuses on
the basics. Thus, how to craft a clear, unified, and interesting sentence takes
center stage. After learning about proper sentence structure, 1886 students
moved on to the proper construction of a paragraph. From there, students
learned how to choose a subject and appropriate language to support it. These
basic building blocks of writing instruction take up most of the 20-page
syllabus, a sample of which is shown below:
See the syllabus in the original
article. It begins with an analysis of the sentence composed of words, phrases
and clauses and how to construct paragraphs.
Macguire concludes his Washington Post piece by saying:
“Colleges should teach the important
writing behaviors first, one at a time, in sequence. They should offer new
writing courses that assume students know nothing about sentences and train new
sentence behaviors from the ground up.”
If the 1886 syllabus is any indication,
such advice isn’t new. Given this revelation, one can’t help but wonder how
many of today’s education woes might find a solution by
simply looking to the past and rediscovering the tried and true methods recent
generations have rejected.
Image Credit: Imperial War Museums
(cropped), Public Domain
Annie
is a senior writer for Intellectual Takeout. In her role, she assists with
website content production and social media messaging.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment