Sen Teacher

Some great printables here.

WideWord

A collaborative writing tool, similar to WriteBoard. But some say better.

Read Print

Eight thousand free books online. Of course, these are out-of-copyright books, hence not recent books. Nevertheless, most of the classics will be here.

The Reported Death of the Humanities

A friend and colleague passes on a link to this piece from The American Scholar, titled “The Decline of the Englsih Department.” It announces and mourns the death of the Humanities in the American University. Since 1970, the proportion of college students who study humanities has roughly been cut in half, from 30% to under 16%. At the same time, business enrollments have grown dramatically, from 14% to 22.

I agree with most of what it says. But I'd like to chip in some of my own thoughts.

The biggest problem with Humanities departments these days, it seems to me he does not mention. It is that they have stopped teaching the Humanities.

The Humanities departments have turned instead to politics--radical, self-indulgent, crazy, elitist politics, too, stuff discredited everywhere else, and of no interest to the average person. Post-colonialism, feminism, “queer studies,” postmodernism, Marxism, Freudianism, any-passing-ism. Junk politics; and getting ahead, in turn, des not involve any longer demonstrating any knowledge or skill in the Humanities. It comes with conforming to specific political positions.

It is not, therefore, at all clear that fewer young people want to study the humanities. It is more likely that more do than ever before. With growing prosperity, one ought to feel more leisure to consider the eternal questions. What is it John Adams wrote? “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” With growing prosperity, the segue should not be from philosophy to business.

If it is, it may be simply that business departments have become the only remainig haven from the crazy politics of the modern university or college; the only part safe from left-wing indoctrination,which also permeates the social sciences, and, with eco-everything, the real sciences too.

Why, however, have our universities deliberately killed the humanities?

Precisely because it is the fastest way for a culture to commiut suicide. Our culture has been so inclined for some time; the baby bust is another example. The culture that does not study its great books, after all, and does not allow its best and brightest that study, is doing just that: deliberately wiping itself out, within a generation or two or three. Our elites quite openly want to do that: all known evils are blamed on European “colonialism,” dead white males, and so forth.

And that's what an education in the Humanities is supposed to be: a study of the culture's Great Books, or better, of the world's Great Books. This means, at the same time, a study of the culture's, and the world's best thoughts. What could be more important? Indeed, it is usually an early sign of totalitarianism when, as in Soviet Russia, Hitler's Germany, or Maoism China, this is suddenly no longer possible. Free thought, and deep thought, is politically dangerous.

Chace, in his article, makes the point that the traditional “Western canon” of great books leaves out many more recent immigrants—not to mention the many students now coming from abroad.

This is a point I have often made myself; when we limit our thought to that of the West, necessarily, we limit our thought. That is not a healthy thing, regardless of how recent immigrants might feel. But the proper solution is not to burn the best books we have. It is to add the great classics of Asian and North African literatures. Not, mind, recent books—the true classics, that have stood the test of time.

Granted, not all parts of the earth have a great literature, just as not all of us have written a great book. That is their problem; we need not make it ours.

Chace is right, however, to point out that in order to be meaningful, the Humanities must, like any other study, involve an established corpus. It must have some agreed outer boundary: chatting on the street, or the latest popular tune, cannot qualify as great literature. One useful rule of thumb might be to exclude anything written within, say, the last 50 years, in order to ensure some lasting significance.

Chace is also right in pointing out that the Humanities have lost their guiding principles, that “to teach English today is to do, intellectually, what one pleases.” This contrasts tellingly with the supposed rigour of, for example, the hard sciences.

But this was not always so; there used to be just such a rigour to the study of the Humanities. It is called religion.

This is why almost all institutions of higher learning in the world, until quite recently, have been founded as explicitly religious institutions.

Without that unifying vision of what the world is, what life is for, and why we are studying, any given aproach to the world's Great Thoughts becomes, essentially, random and arbitrary. Where there is no goal, there is no path. The sciences, held together by the scientific method, do not face this problem. Furthermore, without this shared, considered goal, the resulting vacuum of meaning positively atttracts popular delisions and the madness of crowds: any passing superstition that seems to go explain two facts together is grasped at with a quasi-religions fervour. Hence our current plague of scientism, feminism, Marxism, Freudianism, postmodernism, queerism, behaviourism, constructivism, connectivism, and on and on. Any ism in a tempest.

Western civilization itself has always had such a unifying vision. That is what defined it as Western civilization. That unifying vision is called Christianity. Try to study or understand Western civilization while avoiding any mention of, and remaining deliberately ignorant of, monotheism and Christianity, and you have created for yourself an impossible task; like trying to understand colour while never opening your eyes.

Yet that is precisely what modern Humanities departments, especially in the “public universities” are most systematically bound and determined to do. It is the one closest thing that they have to a unifying vision: that they are not Christian, but secular, and will not under any circumstances discuss Christianity.

We might want to, and easily could, expand that to "monotheism," to the three great monotheistic religions, which are kindred in any event. But to "expand" it by excluding religion is not expansion; it is contraction down to nothing.

The next problem, which Chace does touch on, is linked to this. It is that we have stripped the Humanities of their proper practical application, making it a significant economic hardship to study them. Historically and logically, a degree in the Humanities, a passing familiarity with the best thought of the culture, is the precisely apt qualification to become a teacher in the schools. Currently, teaching as a profession has been usurped by the social sciences, with disastrous results.

Chace laments that research in the Humanities does not bring in research funding. Traditionally, it brought in the most funding of all: it was the churches who sponsored the entire academic enterprise, and the lower schools as well. But this is a vicious circle: strangle the Humanities, and you strangle the churches. Strangle the churches, and you strangle the Humanities.

I like, and strongly endorse, as well, Chace's idea that Humanities departments have a very practical mission in teaching clear expression and writing competence. Rhetoric is an extremely valuable skill not just in teaching, or preaching, but in business (aka salesmanship) in politics and the military (aka leadership) and in the law. It used to be the core of the curriculum. Bizarrely, now, nobody teaches it. The Humanities used to, could and should. They do not now: it is currently even considered fair practice for those writing theses in the Humanities to hire an editor to fix their prose before submitting it—as if clear writing, and clear thought, were not part of what was being assessed.

You'd think a grown-up culture would know better.

Qualifications for ESL

A colleague recently challenged me to say what I considered the proper background for an ESL instructor. So I've given it some thought.

Back in the early days of “ESL,” there were only two or three real qualifications considered: being a native speaker, holding a university degree, and being on-site in a non-English-speaking country.

All of these actually make sense: a non-native speaker, inevitably, will model English incorrectly a certain amount of the time. Someone with a university degree is likely to have demonstrated some additional facility, and is more likely to speak “educated English”--i.e., more standard English. Being on-site in a non-English speaking country also demonstrates some experience with, understanding of, and sensitivity to, non-English-speaking cultures, as well as a certain talent for communication. These are necessary in an ESL classroom.

Nowadays, specific training is becoming much more de rigeur; as the field “professionalizes.” But what specific training is proper, for this subject? Content knowledge might be the obviously important element in other fields, but after all, everyone knows their native language pretty well... right?

Accordingly, the training emphasis has tended to fall on teaching techniques, along the lines of a degree in education. This is, for example, the CELTA way. And more and more, everyone is requiring CELTA.

This is a sad mistake. We have no idea what teaching techniques do or do not work; or rather, we have strong evidence that the products of education schools do worse than random chance. All a formal training in “education” seems to produce is a boring conformity in classes, which is itself detrimental to learning. And the boredom factor, with the b.s. factor, also probably drives out brighter and more dedicated practitioners.

Granted that we want to raise the bar beyond just using anyone with a backpack and a university degree: what qualifications really would be more appropriate?

I submit that the primary qualification here as anywhere else should be subject knowledge. True, everyone knows their own language fairly well, but language is the most complex thing human beings have ever created. It is always possible to be better at it than the next guy, up to the level of sublime genius. Up to the level of a Shakespeare.

And this really does matter to the students, at any level; it reduces the number of errors they will, inevitably, be taught. Better language is also easier to learn from—it is strikingly easy, for example, to memorize a speech from Shakespeare. Moreover, facility with English is almost ipso facto facility in teaching: that is, in communicating ideas and information.

So, how does one determine English ability?

Not that hard, surely, since every university in the USA has been doing it for decades. Consider the verbal sections of the SAT and GRE tests. All one need do, as a recruiter at an ESL school or college, is to ask for official GRE or SAT results, and hire in descending order of verbal score.

Of course, the GRE, SAT, etc., measure only written English; there may be additional considerations. But a personal interview can quickly establish the key requirements for spoken English. Does the interviewee speak in RP or American Standard English? If not, he is of significantly less value to the students. He will be harder for them to understand, and they will be harder for others to understand if they learn their spoken English from him. Does he speak clearly, distinctly, and with animation?

As a practical matter, this may be all you need, in order to hire a good ESL teacher. But little of this is a matter of training. Surely innate abilities can also be cultivated?

Yes they can; as noted before, getting a university education is commonly understood to improve one's expression; or at least to certify it as good; as in the common term “educated English.” It makes sense, then, not just to ask for a university degree, but also for an advanced degree. Emphasis should obviously be given to those degrees that most teach and most require knowledge of and skill with the English language.

This means the germane academic qualification is a higher degree in the humanities. Not education—education is taught as a social science. Rhetoric would be an obvious choice; as would drama. Philosophy, with its need to reason clearly, is perhaps as good; hence also theology. Literature is about at a par with rhetoric, merely emphasizing the written rather than the spoken form. Classics would be very good, for its deep knowledge of the language's cultural underpinnings. Degrees in other languages, taken by an English native speaker, would also be relevant, in terms of demonstrating an intimate knowledge of both language and the language learning process. Linguistics—sometimes currently accepted as a formal ESL qualification--is questionable: in theory, it is the study of language per se, but in practice a degree in linguistics requires very little actual facility with the language, and the field as a whole has produced no verifiable results. At least it shows an interest.

It has not been established that knowledge of formal grammar is important to language learning. It goes in and out of fashion; there are good arguments on either side. Accordingly, I cannot see making this a professional requirement.

Actual length of overseas residence also counts, I think, in determining who would be the best ESL teacher. There is no end to learning about cultural differences. A foreign wife is a very good sign, although it is probably not permissible to take such things into consideration.

I would add a knowledge of educational technology. Here, at least, there are real things to be learned, and demonstrable progress. I think it is fair and indeed obvious to say that any class of students whose instructor does not know currently know how to incorporate a YouTube video into a lesson, or an interactive online exercise, is disadvantaged in their learning.

So there you are: if I were hiring for my own school, or seeking someone to teach me English or any other language, that's what I would look for.

Harvard Goes Online--And Free

Harvard's first free online course is up.

Maybe this is that way all university courses will go. But in the meantime, it is darned good advertising for Harvard.

Hat tip to Cheri MacLeod.

The Death of the Textbook

California, hit by a budget crunch, recently announced it would try to do without textbooks for science and math. Students would go to the Internet instead. My students here in Qatar inform me that this is already the case in Qatari schools: instead of textbooks, every student is issued a laptop suitable for web browsing.

In principle, delivery through the internet and through computers is infinitely preferable to delivery on paper. It is much cheaper, and much better quality, allowing multimedia, personalization, interactivity, quick search, and infinite linkability. It will happen, and probably very soon.

Traditional textbook publishers had better adapt, or die.