Learning Teaching/ Teaching Learning,

and Other Irritating Antimetabole (Quiz Thursday)

I’m teaching four college English courses this fall, mostly night school. Two introductions to college English, one class on the American satirical novel, one survey of genres through humour.

And literary humour is serious business. I make sure they know that as long as I'm in charge, there'll be nothing funny about it. I'm well aware of the multinational publishing and entertainment synergies waiting to gobble up my top students with six-figure starting contracts. All their lives, these kids have had it drilled into them by parents and tv that the only way to get ahead in an interconnected global economy is to study English literature. A tear welling up, one of my students told me how his parents back in their Chinese village used to dream of him going to a Canadian school in order to master writing essays comparing the satirical techniques of Leacock and Nabokov. Now he is on the verge of achieving their dream, and he already has a five-book deal inked with an academic publisher. I smiled broadly to keep my chin from wobbling.

For once, my lesson is clear: now that we've abandoned the horse-and-buggy Copernican system for the hypercaffeinated hack and slash of the Thomasfriedmanian Flatworld, only students who have been trained in the latest rhetorical and compositional skills will be able to compete. More and more, college English essays and even specialized articles are being outsourced to literary sweatshops staffed by young and ambitious Indian and Honduran belletrists—some as young as 12. In North America, those students who can’t keep up with the latest Chaucer theory are shunted into “softer” fields like law, computer science and engineering. And all most of these graduates have to show for their stint in higher education is a bitter look as they hand you your grande frappuccino.

This is a great shame. We should respect the value of a degree whether it’s in liberal arts or not. There are other ways to value people than whether they can tell you the difference between a Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet. What about those who rebel at the thought of giving in to social pressure, taking a quick-and-dirty degree in English or philosophy, and getting that easy job, car, and house that come with it (if you translate the Latin fine print on their BA’s)? Are they not men? Why punish someone who followed his boyhood idealism into inorganic chemistry or marketing?

We need to bring these disillusioned folks back into the fold. To start with, English departments could be more generous in sharing their massive research endowments with their weak sisters. As for my small role, I remind my students not to lord it over anyone that their financial security is guaranteed. A college education should be about more than just broadening your horizons and imagination by exploring the greatest ideas and writings in human history. Learning to use WordPerfect, to make smells in a laboratory, to do tequila body shots, to find your true identity—be it jock, nerd, preppie, slut or freak—all this will make you a more complete person and better able to make conversation with those less fortunate than you.