Feel smug about your level of skill, but don’t consider your smugness a sign of your education.
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The following quote is attributed to Joseph Sobran, about whom you can read a little bit here. While I had some awareness of who Sobran had been prior to seeing the quote, I had never seen this thing until it appeared in a Facebook meme:
In 100 years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.
When I first saw it, I thought True Community would be the perfect place for a scathing response—not necessarily to the quote but to the people who passed it around—and I immediately started shaping an essay. But then, M Litwicki, my friend and colleague from the college where we both teach English left the following comment under the meme:
In 100 years, we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to a very small and very white elite subsection of the population, to expanding college access to be nearly universal, and we are also still teaching remedial subjects in college, which has been standard practice since shortly after the founding of Harvard in 1636.
I’ll add only this über-clarfication of the point:
If you’re among those who passed this meme around Facebook and Twitter hoping to demonstrate just how amazingly clever you are, or just how pathetic we’re all becoming, you might want to trace your ancestry back about 150 years and ask yourself, “Were they literate?” If you answer, “Yes, they were quite literate,” shake hands with fate because they were among a tiny minority. Then realize we’ve expanded your ancestors’—er, if you’re as old as I am, 41, it’s your great-grandparents’—opportunity to virtually anyone (if the Latin teacher will forgive my split infinitive) living in the industrialized world.
It’s not a bad thing that a young person comes to a community college to learn how to compose sentences or (yes!) to gather the lessons we’ve inherited from the Romans and Greeks. In the same way, it might not be a good thing for us to look down on this person, or to demand that he have the same ancestors we do. If anything, it’s not a very educated position to maintain.
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This post has been republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto
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True Community runs each Wednesday. Gint Aras explores his experiences as an instructor in a community college that serves a lower-middle to lower class district in Chicagoland.
Previous True Community articles:
The Young Man With No Guests At Commencement
I Had To Kill A Guy At Work Yesterday
Top 3 Education Myths and How They Affect Men
The only problems with the claims made here that literacy was something that belonged to a small minority back in the day is that such claims are not true. A quick Google search turns up a book (Civil War America, 1850 to 1875) which contains tables on literacy in 1840. The North had far better literacy rates than the South, but the state with the lowest literacy rate was North Carolina with a rate of 72%. Most of the Northern states had literacy rates in the mid to high 90% range and did most of the Midwest. Massachusetts, New Hampshire… Read more »
“It’s not a bad thing that a young person comes to a community college to learn how to compose sentences …it might not be a good thing for us to look down on this person, “-
No, it’s not a bad thing that a young person comes to a community college to learn how to compose sentences. But what is a bad thing is that that young person has had twelve years of education before going to community college and had not been taught basic language skills. The Facebook meme was a putdown of the educational system not the student.
Better late then never?
Which brings me to a question for Gint. Don’t you get frustrated (not with the students) that some of these kids struggle with much of what they should have learned in the prior 12 years?
You could argue better late than never, but with state run schooling systems and ever increasing taxes to support these are you not pissed that your tax dollars can’t even teach a kid to read and right properly in 12 years? Are they actually going to get it right in community college as well? Where does the buck stop? When do stop and say ‘maybe the current education system isn’t working’? At some point we have to draw a line in the sand. Either humans in general are getting that dumb and need 16 years of schooling on how to… Read more »