I remember how it was -- JR
Humanities professors are their own worst enemies
Virtually all the ills plaguing the modern humanities—declining enrollment, loss of funding, fewer tenure-track jobs, decreased public appreciation—have been caused primarily by the people who study and teach them, the humanists. Regardless of where they try to lay the blame, from college administrators to state legislators to students too dumb to know what’s good for them, humanities professors have indeed done all that to themselves.
As a student in the 1980s, like many bookish young people of my era, I gravitated toward the English department because I had always loved to read. I especially enjoyed trying to figure out what writers were trying to say—how they used language and metaphor and symbolism to create meaning. The fact that I was pretty good at it led to a graduate school fellowship, and, eventually, a teaching job.
Imagine my chagrin when, toward the end of my time in grad school, I witnessed the rise of deconstructionism as the dominant literary theory. Deconstructionism basically postulated that literary works have no absolute meaning—that they mean whatever the reader thinks (or feels) they mean.
Having been trained as a formalist, I found that notion baffling and to no small degree disconcerting.
Sure, scholars might disagree about what a writer means; in such disputes lie all the fun of reading and discussing texts. But that doesn’t mean the writer didn’t mean anything, or that a work can mean whatever someone wants it to mean. Such thinking was utterly foreign to me.
Nor did I see the point. If a work of literature doesn’t really mean anything, or if it only means whatever you think it means, what is the value in studying it?
How will the “mind of the past,” as Emerson called it, ever speak to us if we can’t possibly understand its words, no matter how hard we try? Endlessly arguing the vague, arcane, and ultimately circular theories of Derrida and Foucault, it seemed to me, could appeal only to the eggiest of eggheads. Everyone else found them boring and useless.
It’s impossible to date such things exactly, but I believe that is when the demise of the humanities began—especially as deconstructionism as a theory spread to the other arts. Why devote your college years, and perhaps beyond, to the study of something that, according to the experts, you’re never going to be able to understand, anyway?
Even if you’re inclined by nature toward arts and letters, why not focus instead on something that has both ascertainable meaning and practical value, like marketing, or the law? Given the glut of students in marketing programs and law schools, that appears to be exactly what many students have done—students much like me who, a generation ago, might have majored in English and maybe even gone on to pursue graduate degrees in the discipline.
In addition to jettisoning the idea that artworks have inherent meaning, the humanities have nearly politicized themselves out of existence. It’s true that art is sometimes about politics, but it’s not true that all art is political in nature—unless, of course, you’re a Marxist and believe literally everything is political.
And it certainly isn’t true that all artists lean the same way, politically. With regard to politics, as to every other human endeavor, the purpose of great art is to make us think more deeply about our positions, not to tell us what we ought to think. Such is the fallacy of modernism, promulgated under the Marxist assumption that the only legitimate purpose for anything, including art, is to advance socialism.
That idea has naturally led to a new way of evaluating art, based not on quality but on conformity to a political agenda.
Any art that promotes Marxism—including its most recent iteration, “Critical Race Theory”—is therefore “good” art, while those works that “fail” in that regard are necessarily “bad.” By extension, artists who represent the supposed “oppressors”—namely, white males—are rejected en masse, regardless of their ability or accomplishments.
We see this dynamic play out most dramatically when English departments at elite universities eliminate great writers like Shakespeare and Milton from the curriculum and even remove their pictures from the walls.
While it may be true that many college students lean left—especially those inclined toward the arts—there simply aren’t enough dyed-in-the-wool Marxists in the population to support English and other humanities departments that seem to have little aim other than to propagate classical Marxism and Critical Race Theory.
With regard to politics, as to every other human endeavor, the purpose of great art is to make us think more deeply about our positions, not to tell us what we ought to think.
The solution, of course, is to indoctrinate younger students—to inculcate a Marxist worldview among those in required humanities courses like first-year composition. And that is exactly what is being attempted, with (for example) writing assignments requiring students to opine on political issues such as Black Lives Matter, transgenderism, and defunding the police—the obvious assumption being that they will come down on the “right side” of those issues.
Up until a few years ago, I refused to believe things like that were actually happening. But as a senior faculty member serving on various committees, I have read enough of my junior colleagues’ syllabi to conclude otherwise—and I don’t think the problem resides solely at my institution.
I have many friends whose children attend other institutions around the country and the stories they tell only reinforce my conviction that such gratuitous politicization of the core humanities curriculum is widespread, if not nearly ubiquitous.
For example, one professor asked his class to write an essay on the topic, “Why Transgenderism Is a Biological Fact.” Another invited students to explore, in journal entries, their own “toxic Whiteness.” Meanwhile, Robin DiAngelo’s trite, sophomoric jeremiad, White Fragility, has become one of the most frequently assigned first-year composition texts in the country.
The essential problem for humanists is that their attempts at indoctrination have not succeeded, at least not to an extent or in a way that ultimately benefits them. They may move some students further left—although not, I suspect, as many as they imagine—but they ignore the reality that most students aren’t particularly interested in politics as such.
The vast majority just want to get a degree that will enable them to make a comfortable living, and they see no connection between writing essays about transgenderism or reading polemics on Critical Race Theory, and any real-world skills that might assist them in that endeavor. So, they write what they think the professor wants to hear, then go on and major in something else that they perceive will lead to a good job.
Clearly, if one of the purposes of lower-level courses in the humanities is to attract majors, we are failing spectacularly.
And the fault for that is entirely our own. The culprits are not state legislators who keep cutting our budgets, administrators who balk at adding new tenure lines, or money-grubbing bourgeois students who care more about their own “privilege” than about “social justice.”
We have essentially told the truth-seekers that there is no such thing as truth—and certainly none to be found in the study of the arts—and alienated the half of the country that disagrees with us politically while stripping our curriculum of anything practical.
About the only reason a student today would major in English or philosophy or art history is because they want to be a professor. Good luck with that.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/12/dear-humanists-you-have-done-that-yourself%E2%80%AF/
New Report Shows College Completion Rates Are Leveling OffAfter several years of steady improvement, college completion rates appear to have reached a plateau. According to the just-released Completing College report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC), the national six-year completion rate for students entering college in the fall 2014 stood at 60.1%, representing just a .3 percentage point gain over last year, the smallest increase for the past five years. This year’s slowing improvement compares to 1.4 and 2.2 percentage point gains in the previous two cohorts, respectively.
The national completion rate reported by the NSCRC includes all students who enter postsecondary education for the first time during a given year. It counts students enrolling full-time or part-time at two-year or four-year institutions, and then completing a degree or certificate at any U.S. degree-granting institution within six years. (NSCRC reports eight-year completion rates as well.) It also includes those students who complete a credential after they transfer, not just those who complete at their starting institution.
Thus, the results are not the same as the six-year rate for earning a baccalaureate degree. If a student starts his or her education at a two-year school and then earns either an AA or BA degree, NSCRC treats that student as a completer. Likewise, if a student starts at a four-year college and finishes with either an AA or BA, that student is also counted as a completer. The report therefore captures the diverse pathways to postsecondary completion achieved by today’s students, who increasingly transfer between institutions and across state lines, stop-out of college and then re-enter, and shift between part-time and full-time status.
The report concludes that progress in the national completion rate has stalled largely because traditional age students and community college starters have lost ground, compared to last year’s rates of completion.
When comparing completion rates by the type of institution where students begin their studies, stark differences emerge.
Among students beginning at private, nonprofit four year colleges, 76.7% earn a credential within six years.
At students starting at four-year public schools, 67.4% do so.
Only 45.2% of students beginning their studies at private, for-profit institutions finish within six years.
And at public, two-year colleges, 40.2% of students who first enroll in those institutions earn a credential in six years.
Completion Rates By Ethnicity
As in years past, completion rates continue to vary to a disturbing degree among students, depending on ethnicity.
Among students starting their college careers at public four-year schools, 80% of Asians, 73% of white students, 59% of Hispanics and 50% of Blacks complete within six years.
For starters at two-year public schools, the six-year completion rates are 51% (Asians), 49% (whites), 36% (Hispanics), and 28% (Black).
Completion Rates By State
For 42 states for which sufficient data were available, statewide six-year completion rate decreased by at least 0.5 percentage points in eleven, including five states that had at least a one percentage point drop. Completion rates improved in 21 states, with nine showing at least a one percentage point gain.
Asked about the implications of the slowing completion gains, Mikyung Ryu, Director of research publications for the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, told me, “After completion gains steadily diminished each year post-recession, having reached a tipping point this year is no big surprise. We are losing ground with traditional age students who have the best chances of finishing college in time, implying that the nation is now heading in the wrong direction. Moreover, growing inequities should not be taken lightly. Think about the ripple effects of community colleges being the only sector seeing completion declines this year whereas public universities continue to make progress.”
Those ripple effects are of major concern because they are one more indicator of the need to improve - through policy and investment - the health of the nation’s public two-year colleges. As the access point for so many students - particularly minority students and returning adults - the nation’s two-year colleges have been a broad-access gateway to educational opportunity. Their support and success now need to become a national priority.
Thanks To COVID, A Renaissance In Religious Schooling
Parents are increasingly comfortable with smaller non-public schools and Christian institutions are taking the lead.
One of the most striking cultural developments to come out of the COVID pandemic is the greater willingness of families to experiment with alternative schooling. Wishing to provide their children with a more stable learning environment than the erratic re-openings of conventional public and private schools, many parents have joined with neighbors to create collaborative home schools—or what have come to be called “learning pods.”
Other parents have enrolled their children in streamlined schools where individual grade levels (also called “pods”) are usually limited to no more than 12 students and often reflect an educational theme or philosophy. Some of these self-described “micro-schools” employ professional educators, but parents themselves typically share the teaching load or at least provide supporting services.
In the recent spate of articles on the reasons for this trend, journalists have typically focused on the sophistication of today’s online curricula, the flexibility more parents have as the result of working from home, and, in the case of a few wealthy households, the means to hire highly credentialed tutors. But almost completely overlooked has been the critical role played by churches.
“The unsung heroes are the pastors and church boards,” says Tina Hollenbeck, founder of the Homeschool Resources Roadmap, which reviews online curricula for families and small schools. For months, they have provided the “spaces where kids can gather in small groups to learn with and alongside their parents and other adult leaders.”
Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home School Education Research Institute, agrees: “There’s no official data yet, but with so many parents looking for places to safely educate their children, the use of religious settings has clearly accelerated.”
That churches have turned out to be the most popular non-home venue for learning pods and micro schools comes as no surprise to Texas Public Policy Foundation education analyst Erin Valdez, who herself was educated at parish-sited homeschool cooperatives in Florida and Texas. Small parent-run schools “have been around in some form for decades,” she says. And houses of worship have always offered them something few other community institutions could match: access to a large, safe, and morally uplifting venue mostly unused or underused during the workweek.
In recent years, pastors have provided much more than space, doing what they can to keep a school’s costs down while simultaneously using their influence to expand students’ study and recreational options, such as the ability to field teams in the local parochial school sports league. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, students in the Olivet Baptist Church micro school are granted once-a-week access to the science laboratories at the more traditional Chattanooga Christian School.
Then there is the case of DELTIC (Doing Education Life Together in Christ) Prep, a homeschooling cooperative on the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border, which for more than a decade has been educating 70 to 90 preschool-through-twelfth-grade students for approximately $15 each. It helps “greatly that the church where we meet during the week contributes utilities,” says Sandra Authier, one of DELTIC’s two parent program directors.
But perhaps the most important thing churches give small parent-run schools is the freedom to innovate. In Bowie, Maryland, for example, the United Methodist Mt. Oak Fellowship Church has for six years hosted the Bridge Elementary Tutorial Homeschool Ministries, which under director Kym Kent offers an a la carte menu of inexpensive tutored courses.
Families can sign up a child for just one $300 class ($275 prepaid) or use the program as a fully functioning elementary school. Critically, parents who themselves teach can arrange to instruct each other’s children in lieu of paying tuition.
And on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona, Jeremiah Cota has established a third-through-eighth-grade micro school in his uncle’s Assembly of God Church, which combines conventional coursework with a tribal culture curriculum. The program has already qualified for the state’s K-12 school choice tuition subsidies, and Coda aims to soon carry students all the way through high school.
Recognizing the overlooked role of churches in facilitating both the growth of small, parent-run schools and their abrupt expansion during the current crisis raises the interesting question of what educational role local parishes might continue to play even after the coronavirus. A September poll by EdChoice provocatively suggests that American parents have become far more comfortable with small school options since the outbreak. And perhaps not coincidentally, Dr. Kevin Baxter, chief innovation officer at the National Catholic Education Association, has been working on a manual of principals for creating successful church micro schools, scheduled for publication next spring.
Arizona State University professor Andrew Barnes, whose specialty is the history of African and European Christianity, notes that from the 16th century to the mid-1800s, organized religion was primary innovator of lay education. “I can see that happening again,” he says.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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