Essay:Flaws of Phyllis Schlafly Column on Modern English Schooling
From Conservapedia
This essay is an original work by TomMoore. Please comment only on the talk page.
Reading the recent essay by conservative pundit Phyllis Schlafly, twice linked from CP's main page, I was struck by how much the academic world must have changed since she went to school. She scorns at how universities no longer teach Shakespeare as “the best that has been thought and said,” and mockingly recounts the titles of some courses along with her own analysis of their worth, stating
Many undergraduate courses focus on extremely specialized subjects of interest only to the professor who is trying to "publish or perish," but of virtually no value to students. Examples are: "Beast Culture: Animals, Identity, and Western Literature" at the University of Pennsylvania; and "Food and Literature" at Swarthmore College.
It seems to me, however, that while she makes some valid points, overall her essay reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of current English scholarship. Things were much different during World War II (when she attended undergraduate classes), and much of modern academia is spent questioning the preconceived and privileged positions of the past centuries. These are exactly the positions Schlafly was taught and which she seems to still hold. It’s not necessarily wrong, simply ignorant of new developments.
It must be admitted right off the bat, of course, that in the 64 years since Schlafly graduated from Washington University with a degree in Government, the English departments of the world have changed somewhat. Among these changes, first of all, is the admission that Shakespeare is indeed taught much less, and is no longer required for some required courses in university English departments. Indeed, it would even be fair to say that many students graduate without ever having read anything written by the Bard, including many (although much fewer) English majors. This is very unfortunate.
However, some degree of understanding has to be applied. English departments of the modern day have come to understand that a book need not necessarily have been written by a European or American in order to be excellent, and that indeed many of those texts from the rest of the world are extraordinarily valuable. Further, current academics have realized the value of postmodern approaches (such as the deconstruction Schlafly so derides) in addition to more traditional textual and biographical analyses.
It is now generally acknowledged that the amount of books one can cover in an undergraduate English major’s education is lamentably small. Depending on the strength of the university’s core curriculum and the class choice of the student, this number can be as few as thirty. And while it can range as high as hundreds, far too many students choose to do the minimum of work, selecting such classes as are required and seem easy or fun.
The concept of required classes – generally survey courses - bears close scrutiny. These classes must be relatively few and yet provide a fundamental basis for future classes and as thorough a glimpse of the breadth of literary scholarship as can be managed. A survey course must skim the top of the world of English academia, touching the surface at intervals to provide a wide course over the whole.
Since academics are no longer inclined to discard works of other cultures, this means that some items that were taught during the first half of the twentieth century cannot be fit into the modern survey course. If you teach the Mahabharata or Ramayana on the strength of their astounding longevity and influence over a large swath of the world, then you might have to, regrettably, teach one fewer sets of Shakespearean sonnets. It is an exceedingly hard decision to make, and one which I am sure the editors of Norton Anthologies and their analogues tackle with difficulty every time they issue an edition. But it is a decision a mature editor and professor must make: facing a limited amount of time and a huge amount of material from Western and Eastern canons, absolutely necessary for the modern English major to know in order to have even a shred of grounding in academia: what do you discard?
Schlafly probably does not agree with such sentiments, of course. At the time during which she went to school, little attention was paid to what she calls “ethnic or non-Western literature.” Perhaps this touches on a fundamental disconnect, in fact: could she admit the value of reading the Tao Te Ching, even if it would mean that fewer European authors long considered “canonical” would be covered? Considering that modern scholarship will often draw from a diverse range of subjects, and researchers range far afield in finding beauty and brilliance in the works of the world, I suspect professors would be doing their students a serious disservice to bend to ideology and teach only what was taught sixty years ago.
I suspect that Schlafly would probably have been seriously unhappy if she taken her English courses a few decades earlier. Strangely, many books now and then considered indispensable were ignored completely, until some liberal scholar brought them to the attention of an academic world. Moby Dick was not considered Melville’s best and largely went untaught until the twenties, when Carl Van Doren (a scholar and author of Why I Am an Unbeliever) reintroduced it to the world.
It is, perhaps, ultimately simple ignorance speaking when she claims that the “untalented, unimportant women and minorities” are the ones replacing some items that were more traditionally studied. Achebe and Thurston are some authors who have replaced the “Dead White European Males” (as she mockingly repeats), and I find it hard to believe anyone could have read their works and seriously called them untalented. And considering how dominant and mainstream post-colonialism and comparative studies are in modern literary criticism, one can hardly call them “unimportant,” either. Perhaps someone just needs to give this poor woman a summer reading list. The rigor of college courses of all stripes has declined, and this is unfortunate. It is equally unfortunate that the increasing illiteracy of the general populace has made every book an obstacle, and yielded such a small crop of enthusiastic critical readers. But it’s a vicious cycle, where poor students fail to meet even low standards, and so the standards are lowered even further. The blame lies just as much on other spheres, such as parenting and lower education (the laughable Republican “No Child Left Behind” Act left many children behind).
Learning is but an adjunct to ourself / And where we are, our learning likewise is --Love’s Labour Lost
