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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has since 2006 taken it upon itself to issue a series of report-length sneers at those the reports define as civically illiterate—and, by extension, at America’s colleges and universities, whose job it’s supposed to be to teach the ISI’s brand of civics. And so, every year, the ISI’s American Civic Literacy Program fields its own more esoteric version of the Tonight Show’s “Jaywalking” quizzes, and then scandalizes itself and its conservative coterie by retailing the respondents’ ignorance of such things as the conditions of “free enterprise or capitalism,” the definition of “business profit,” and the relative merits of “free markets” and “centralized planning” as means for securing “more economic prosperity.”
This year, the ISI set out to answer the following question: “How does graduating from college or gaining civic knowledge change someone’s public views?” The resulting report includes such “major findings” as that, when compared to non-college graduates, college graduates are more likely to support same-sex marriage and less likely to favor teacher-led prayer in public schools. If you consider the fact that federal judges have affirmed that both positions comport with the US Constitution, then you might expect the ISI to count these among the findings that demonstrate a consoling advance in civic knowledge. But you’d be wrong. “Civic knowledge,” the ISI found, leads instead to the affirmation of conservative shibboleths. For example, “having more civic knowledge makes one more likely to agree that prosperity depends on entrepreneurs and free markets.” And “if two people otherwise share the same basic characteristics, the one with greater civic knowledge will be . . . less likely to agree that global capitalism produces few winners and many losers.” The ISI also found the civically knowledgeable to be “less likely to agree that the Ten Commandments are irrelevant today.” You get the idea.
Taken out of context—that is, considered within a contemporary American context—Alan Bennett’s play (and, later, movie) The History Boys can be read as satirizing the values of the standardized testing movement. Set in early-1980s England, the plot centers on a group of pupils who are preparing (or, perhaps more accurately, are being prepared) for the Oxbridge entrance exams. Their ambitious headmaster recruits a cynical and, as it turns out, fraudulently credentialed history teacher who dedicates himself to what we’d call “teaching to the test,” with all that that phrase implies. Meanwhile, Hector, an erudite and unorthodox English teacher, refuses the mandate to prepare his students for the all-important test, hoping instead to prepare them for life by exposing them to wisdom—and his own highly singular influence. “I count examinations, even for Oxford and Cambridge, as the enemy of education,” Hector explains.
As you’d expect, the test-happy headmaster is quick to recognize the threat Hector poses to his ambition. (Oxbridge scholarships would translate directly into increased prestige for the school.) “Shall I tell you what is wrong with Hector as a teacher?” the headmaster asks. “It isn’t that he doesn’t produce results. He does. But they are unpredictable and unquantifiable and in the current educational climate that is no use. He may well be doing his job, but there is no method that I know of that enables me to assess the job that he is doing. There is inspiration, certainly, but how do I quantify that?” Read the rest of this entry »
On August 25, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis was a guest on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation.” In response to a question from a part-time faculty member who called in to the program, the secretary said that she “think[s] the continuance of involvement on the part of part-time faculty members . . . is a legitimate issue and should be looked at. Because as it stands, you also find that that faculty member is not as inclined to stay committed to those groups of students that they do teach because they’re off to different—other—what they call, freeway traveling or teaching because they’re going to find wherever they can get their salary paid. And it’s unfortunate that that’s what it’s kind of turned to.”
As innocuous as this may sound, Solis’s response nonetheless “worried some activists concerned about contingent faculty working conditions” enough to spur the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) into action. Within days, the AFT had sought and received clarification from the secretary: “I certainly was not implying that adjuncts are not committed to their students, or that they are anything other than excellent educators.” Read the rest of this entry »
Higher education discourse is clotted with a surfeit of claims made by advocates lobbying to attain the status of a literacy for the particular configuration of abilities, skills, or forms of knowledge and competency fostered within their purview. The Chronicle, to give just a few examples, has carried a “plea for spatial literacy”; an argument that “in the end, we are all poorly served by an academic community that does not promote biocultural literacy”; and a notice of major foundation support for digital-media literacy. Not surprisingly, the calls for “financial literacy” and “economic literacy” are the loudest right now. The idea, it seems, is that a literacy stands a better chance of making the list of shared goals for student learning. Depending on where they go to school, students today may be expected to achieve some level of quantitative literacy, cultural literacy, technological literacy, scientific literacy, informational literacy, statistical literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, civic literacy, digital literacy, and so on (and on, and on . . .); there’s even something called “Diaspora literacy.”
However limitless the list of literacies pressing for curricular attention may seem, it’s worth noting that this is contested ground. The Chronicle has also carried arguments against, for example, information literacy (“the wrong solution to the wrong problem”). Perhaps the best-known antiliteracy argument was made by the mathematics and computer science professor Paul De Palma in “http://www.when_is_enough_enough?.com,” a widely circulated (and cleverly titled) essay first published in the American Scholar. Yet as compelling as De Palma’s examination of “just who benefits from the computer literacy movement (and who pays for it)” may be, even he had to acknowledge that the odds don’t favor the opposition in a dispute over anything described as a literacy. “Sadly, the proponents of computer literacy have won the high ground by virtue of the term itself. Who would argue with literacy? . . . Literacy, like motherhood and apple pie in the America of my youth, is unassailable.” Read the rest of this entry »
