August 8, 2016
Prof: Today’s Students and Professors ‘Know Hardly Anything about Anything at All’
Daniel Lattier
Six months ago we shared a frightening observation from Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at Notre Dame who has also taught at Princeton and Georgetown. He described his students as “know-nothings… devoid of any substantial knowledge.”
More recently, a respected author and English professor at Providence College in Rhode Island has echoed Deneen’s concerns.
In an essay titled “Exercises in Unreality: The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization,” Anthony Esolen describes a university climate today in which many students and professors no longer possess the knowledge and skills that their peers of previous generations took for granted:
- “But what if you know hardly anything about anything at all? That is
an exaggeration, but it does capture much of what I must confront as a
professor of English right now, even at our school, which accepts only a
small fraction of students who apply for admission. Nor, I’m afraid, does
it apply only to freshmen. It applies also to professors.”
- “I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most
English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer,
Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been
largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best
and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy
of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know
some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The
writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You
cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, ‘Your verb here does not
agree with your subject.’ That is not only because they do not understand
the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will
have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make
grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the
written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text
messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic
sludge that they are taught for ‘formal’ writing, and that George Orwell
identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad
writers of English; the others write no language known to man.”
Do you think that things can be turned around in the near future? Or are we destined to slip further into an educational dark age?
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/prof-todays-students-and-professors-know-hardly-anything-about-anything-all --
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PoliticalForum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
